http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/authors/4641/dipsikha-thakur Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines. en-us Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:27:08 -0400 Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:27:08 -0400 http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1733/the-poetics-of-witnessing-in-the-works-of-seamus-heaney By Dipsikha Thakur - In his poem ‘Punishment’ from the poetry collection North (1975), Seamus Heaney picks up the voice of a witness who is suspended between the possibilities of love, silence, voyeurism, outrage and above all, the understanding of the process of violence that brings the ‘numbered bones’ of the corpse it describes to its present state. While it would no doubt be too obvious a strategy to read Heaney’s personal voice in that of the speaker of this poem, there are nonetheless resonances in this state of paralysis between mutually irreconcilable positions that brings to... Thu, 22 Mar 2018 04:25 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1733/the-poetics-of-witnessing-in-the-works-of-seamus-heaney