“Past Master”: Czeslaw Milosz and his Impact on Seamus Heaney's Poetry

The essay examines the influence of Czeslaw Milosz on Seamus Heaney's writing, focusing primarily on the early 1980s, which was a period of major transition in Heaney's literary and academic career, following the success of Field Work (1979) in the USA and his appointment as a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard. It establishes the political and biographical contexts for Heaney's reception of Milosz's prose and poetry, and discusses the importance of Milosz's Nobel Lecture and his memoir, Native Realm, in fostering Heaney's feelings of affinity and sense of difference. Composed in the wake of Solidarity's challenge to the post-war status quo, Milosz's reflections in the Nobel Lecture on history, art, and the artist's responsibilities had a profound resonance for his fellow exile, uncertain as he was how to address the Hunger Strikes in the collection he was working on, Station Island. The essay thus explores the range of factors which resulted in Milosz becoming The Master to Heaney, and ends offering an analysis of his poem of that title. It draws on a range of literary and historical sources, including the Heaney archives at Emory, Atlanta. Since it is the centenary of Milosz's birth, it offers a timely reminder of his importance in world literature. (Since it may not be familiar to many readers, I have included an outline of Milosz's biography at the start of the essay.) © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

The importance of wildlife rabies control

Rabies in animals has been known In North America for over two centuries, and whether the disease was initially present in wild species or was introduced by dogs, it has been known in skunks for almost a century and a half. Today more rabies cases in wild animals are reported than in domestic animals, and a considerable proportion of both human and domestic animal exposures to the disease are the result of wild-animal contact. The most useful techniques for controlling wild animal rabies today are methods that reduce contact between infected individuals and susceptible individuals; these involve the manipulation of populations, most often by direct reduction methods. Such techniques have proved effective in controlling or eliminating the disease; they are most effective when the area involved is small and/or isolated by barriers. The effectiveness of animal reduction programs on rabies is limited by the range of the animals involved, of ingress from surrounding areas for animals incubating the disease, and the continuity of the program; at least two maximum incubation periods of the disease must have elapsed as insurance that incubating animals are not left to serve as a new nucleus of infection. Rabies control programs for wild species have not yet threatened any species with extinction, nor are they likely to in the future

Extragalactic Planetary Nebulae: Observational Challenges & Future Prospects

The study of extragalactic planetary nebulae (EPN) is a rapidly expanding field. The advent of powerful new instrumentation such as the PN spectrograph has led to an avalanche of new EPN discoveries both within and between galaxies. We now have thousands of EPN detections in a heterogeneous selection of nearby galaxies and their local environments, dwarfing the combined galactic detection efforts of the last century. Key scientific motivations driving this rapid growth in EPN research and discovery have been the use of the PNLF as a standard candle, as dynamical tracers of their host galaxies and dark matter and as probes of Galactic evolution. This is coupled with the basic utility of PN as laboratories of nebula physics and the consequent comparison with theory where population differences, abundance variations and star formation history within and between stellar systems informs both stellar and galactic evolution. Here we pose some of the burning questions, discuss some of the observational challenges and outline some of the future prospects of this exciting, relatively new, research area as we strive to go fainter, image finer, see further and survey faster than ever before and over a wider wavelength regimeComment: 4 pages, no figures, LaTeX, to be published in Proceedings of the ESO workshop on Planetary Nebulae beyond the Milky Way held at ESO, Garching, May 19-21, 200

Dynamical evolution of star forming regions - II. Basic kinematics

We follow the dynamical evolution of young star-forming regions with a wide range of initial conditions and examine how the radial velocity dispersion, $\sigma$, evolves over time. We compare this velocity dispersion to the theoretically expected value for the velocity dispersion if a region were in virial equilibrium, $\sigma_{\rm vir}$ and thus assess the virial state ($\sigma / \sigma_{\rm vir}$) of these systems. We find that in regions that are initially subvirial, or in global virial equilibrium but subvirial on local scales, the system relaxes to virial equilibrium within several million years, or roughly 25 - 50 crossing times, according to the measured virial ratio. However, the measured velocity dispersion, $\sigma$, appears to be a bad diagnostic of the current virial state of these systems as it suggests that they become supervirial when compared to the velocity dispersion estimated from the virial mass, $\sigma_{\rm vir}$. We suggest that this discrepancy is caused by the fact that the regions are never fully relaxed, and that the early non-equilibrium evolution is imprinted in the one-dimensional velocity dispersion at these early epochs. If measured early enough ($<$2 Myr in our simulations, or $\sim$20 crossing times), the velocity dispersion can be used to determine whether a region was highly supervirial at birth without the risk of degeneracy. We show that combining $\sigma$, or the ratio of $\sigma$ to the interquartile range (IQR) dispersion, with measures of spatial structure, places stronger constraints on the dynamical history of a region than using the velocity dispersion in isolation.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA