Fiddleheads

A different angle on the ‘erotic’, not the ‘wood nymph’ presence in Moyulla or the more overt sexuality of Tate’s Avenue, rather a memory of sensual pleasure-on-a-plate. This short prose-poem is designed to bring a smile to the lips of a Japanese friend. In a surprise choice, Heaney selects fiddlehead ferns, a culinary delicacy not to be found just anywhere, as a foodstuff that gave him a thrill. He offers them in response to a Japanese friend’s expressed literary taste for the erotic and his suggestion that there was not enough of it in poetry. In a neat tongue-in-cheek, Heaney serves up an erotic dish Toraiwa would not have had in mind – fiddlehead ferns, sexy in the way they […]