The evening is opened by the University of Manchester’s own John McAuliffe, who introduces the other panellists and welcomes a humming crowd into the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall. He extends his appreciation to Seamus’s daughter, Catherine Heaney, who is in attendance, and thanks her for her contribution to the formation of the new collection, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, a compilation of all the poems published in his lifetime. The news of Catherine’s presence is received with a cheerful “aww” from the auditorium and a sprinkling of applause.
Bernard O’Donoghue is the first of the five speakers. He co-edited this collection and could thus be seen as having the most extensive scope of Heaney’s wider, lesser-known work. He confesses that, like many, he will never answer the question, “What’s your favourite Heaney Poem?” the same way twice, but has still attempted to select a handful of poems featured in the book that stuck out to him during the editing process.
The first of these is ‘Mint’, a piece of writing which allegorises a freshly-cut, seemingly ‘beneath notice’ herb at the Heaney’s kitchen table on a Sunday morning. In its final lines, the poem stresses the action of ‘disregarding’ that which is overlooked, and provides a stimulating introduction to an evening focused on praising a man whose greatest power was his careful ability to look.
He then delivers a mellow recital of ‘Holly’, a sweet Christmas poem that shows off Heaney’s capacity to translate the contrast between the sharp, snowy bite of nature and the orange warmth of the indoors during wintertime. This is followed by ‘Carlo’, a previously unpublished comical poem about his family’s dog, and ‘The Butts’, a gorgeous elegy to a lost relative, articulated through the all-too-familiar feeling of seeing their clothes hanging in a wardrobe after their passing.
‘In Bellaghy Graveyard’ marks the end of O’Donoghue’s selected poems. ‘It was hardly worth my while going home now,’ laments Heaney, describing the quiet aftermath of a parent’s funeral. It’s a poem that is set in the graveyard where he now rests, a quote from ‘The Gravel Walks’ carved on his headstone.
After a round of applause from a moved audience, poet and novelist Nick Laird takes to the stage. He, similarly, expresses a great difficulty in cherry-picking such a limited medley of poems from the overwhelming catalogue in front of him, but opens nonetheless with ‘Mossbawn 1: Sunlight’ from Heaney’s 1975 collection, North. “He’s quite good!” jokes Laird as he echoes, ‘Words so seismic and plain’, a quote from the closing lines of the previously unpublished ‘Tremor’.
‘And then he trembled like a heatwave and faded’ is the final line of the excerpt from Station Island, which Laird closes his time on stage with. The excerpt is about the 1977 killing of William Strathearn, and Laird’s stirring reading of it is praised by fellow panellist Sinéad Morrissey later in the evening.
Leonita Flynn, another Irish poet and writer, also chooses to recite a Station Island poem as she tiptoes through the lyrics of ‘The Railway Children’. “I read it for the first time when I was 20, and it made me dizzy,” she says as she introduces it. Once she has finished reading, she mentions how much both she and her daughter love it, and touches on the brilliant power to unify that the universality of Heaney’s poetry allows for.
Her selection also includes a pair of unreleased poems that Heaney wrote in the later part of his life about new writers who were just starting out as his time came to a close. If my memory can be trusted, they are called ‘For All Those Starting Out’ and ‘On The Gift of a Fountain Pen’. For any young aspiring poets or writers who pick up a copy of the collection, these are certainly two pieces to keep an eye out for.
Sinéad Morrissey is next. She describes Heaney’s work as “voluminously productive, but also various, […] a cornucopia of different types of poems”, before reading ‘Limbo’ and the previously uncollected ‘Shelf Life’. In her description of the latter, she makes note of Seamus’s ability to write about inanimate objects and make an ordinary vessel capable of holding the extraordinary. After reciting a commissioned work for Harvard University, Morrissey delivers a vivid rendition of ‘From the Republic of Conscience’. Slicing through the silence that the poem brings into the concert hall, she quietly exclaims, “I think that poem has found its moment.”
Before beginning the Q&A, the evening’s host, John McAuliffe, returns to the stage and reads a selection of mostly unpublished or uncollected works. He also discusses the understood significance of North and how this collection was so different to everything that came before it, and then read ‘Kinship’, one of Heaney’s ‘bog poems’. The ‘bog poems’ refers to a collection of pieces, mostly featured in North, describing Iron Age bodies that were found in bogs across Europe during Seamus’s lifetime.
The panel discussion is brief but thought-provoking. When asked about his first encounter with the poet, Nick Laird cites studying ‘Death of a Naturalist’ during his time at Cookstown High School and how close he was to Seamus’s birthplace of Castledawson. He describes the poetry as being on his front door.
Just last summer, I visited my own family in Cookstown and drove to Magherafelt and Lough Beg, two places that feature in Heaney’s writing. In Lough Beg, there are little speakers on the tops of fenceposts that will play a tinny recording of the poems being read by their author. To have Heaney’s voice soundtrack a view of Church Island is touching enough; I can only imagine how it feels to grow up in that same environment that he writes about so forcefully.
“Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.”
From ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, by Seamus Heaney
On the same question, Flynn discusses studying ‘Mid-Term Break’ for her GCSEs and also recalls that her father, a man who certainly did not read poetry, had a copy of North in the house when she was growing up. She commends Heaney’s ability to break out of the poetry circle and do the impossible thing of being equally beloved by critics and casual readers.
McAuliffe then asks Bernard O’Donoghue what part of editing this collection surprised him the most. O’Donoghue’s answer focused on the context that was provided to the better-known poems. He observes how, in this definitive collection, the themes that breathe through Heaney’s poetry can be stalked as they gradually emerge and then slowly slip away. Many of the previously uncollected poems are still works that Seamus thought very highly of, and therefore still have so much to offer readers, especially in the contexts of the pieces that were published instead. This question is then presented to the rest of the panel, whose answers praise his ability to produce such an overwhelmingly gargantuan amount of substantial poetry, even under the harsh spotlight that Heaney found himself under during his life.
Before the crowd disperses into the lobby and queues up for autographs and copies of the new collection, McAuliffe closes the event with a reading of an excerpt from ‘Crossings’, a poem from the aptly named 1991 collection, Seeing Things.
“Everything flows. Even a solid man,” he reads, “[…] Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet / As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and cross-roads, / Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.” With this, the members of the audience – many of whose eyes have attentively closed for most of the evening – make their way ever so gently out.
It feels only appropriate to end a summary of the evening by quoting Nick Laird’s use of Heaney’s own words to describe his impact:
“He is poetry to me.”
