Eco Sculpture: McClay Library Belfast and Reading Seamus Heaney

The statue in front of the McClay Library is called Eco and was created by the Breton artist Marc Didou. It is made of bronze and is 2.5m tall. 

The piece is made in response to the artist's investigation of  digital imaging techniques and represents the reflection of a head refracted in water and the sonic echo used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).  

I am reading a poem called 'Postscript' which is one of my favourite poems from Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level:

These are a few lines from the poem:

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I also  read ‘St. Kevin and the Blackbird’.

These are a few lines from the poem:

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird,
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked.

St Kevin was born around 498 and may have lived to 618. This Irish saint founded Glendalough in Wicklow and became its first abbot. He was ordained by Bishop Lugidus and after his ordination he left his community to become a hermit.

Even though he suffered terrible bodily pain, Saint Kevin did not move until the little blackbirds were hatched out. I suppose it’s about responding to the situation and doing the right thing, no matter what the cost. When we set out on our spiritual journey, we have to let go of our own ego.