The main character, an escaped slave from another planet, meets a character who calls himself “Virgil,” a rastafarian who speaks in verse and helps guide The Brother through a dark moment.
posted on August 31, 2013 by
Seamus Heaney
“In ‘Station Island’ (1984) — a dazzling reworking of Dante, set on an Irish island known for centuries as a place of religious pilgrimage — all the themes of Heaney’s work come together in an orchestral whole. Here, the present, past and myth merge and overlap, and the competing claims on an artist emerge in the form of ghosts: literary ghosts, ghosts from the poet’s own past and ghosts from Ireland’s past: a young priest ‘glossy as a blackbird” and a shopkeeper cousin shot in the head, who ‘trembled like a heat wave and faded.’ ” […] –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, August 30, 2013
