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Seamus Heaney holding a replica saxon helmet in 2002. PA Images
Let's Get Quizzical
Quiz: How well do you know your Irish poetry?
Will things fall apart for you in this quiz?
POETRY, EH? IT’S good in a crisis.
It feels like the whole country at the minute is repeating that now-famous Seamus Heaney quote – “if we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere” – as we all look forward to the eventual end of this coronavirus pandemic.
If you are one of the people reading more poetry to get you through these strange days and weeks (0r even if you’re not) why not test yourself – how well do you know your classic Irish poetry?
One of Seamus Heaney's best-known works is digging. Complete the opening line: Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests; snug as a....
PA Images
Spade
Gun
Pint glass
Bug
Where was the "disused shed" Derek Mahon wrote about?
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Wicklow
Dublin
Waterford
Wexford
Finish this famous line: Wherever green is worn, are changed, changed utterly.....
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A terrible beauty is created
A really really terrible beauty is born
A terrible beauty is born
A shockingly bad beauty is born
Eavan Boland wrote a famous poem about the Famine. What is it called?
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Quarantine
Isolation
The Great Hunger
At a Potato Digging
Which poet described Dublin as: "She is not an Irish town and she is not an English town."
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Paula Meehan
WB Yeats
Louis MacNeice
Patrick Kavanagh
Whose ghost "came whispering" to Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Epic?
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WB Yeats
Patrick Pearse
Shakespeare
Homer
Outside which famous Dublin building did Paul Durcan profess to "making love" when he was a boy?
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Guinness Storehouse
The GPO
Leinster House
Áras an Uachtaráin
Who wrote the poem "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks"?
Medbh McGuckian
Paula Meehan
Leontia Flynn
Nick Laird
Paul Muldoon once wrote a poem about an Irish roundabout. Where was it?
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Adare
Keady
Ballygawley
Carlingford
"We have no prairies to slice a big sun at evening" - which Irish poet wrote these lines?
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Patrick Kavanagh
Michael Longley
Seamus Heaney
Ciaran Carson
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You scored out of !
Top dog
You nailed it
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You scored out of !
Clever cat
Almost purrfect
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You scored out of !
Fintastic
A good effort
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You scored out of !
What are ewe doing?
Baaaaaaaad
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You scored out of !
Turtely awful
A shell of a bad effort
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