Last summer, both the BBC and RTÉ broadcast programmes to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney. They are still available on BBC Sounds and RTÉ’s website (www.rte.ie).
Four Sides of Seamus Heaney (BBC Radio 4) is a series of four half-hour programmes in which different presenters explore aspects of the poet’s work, illustrated with recordings of Heaney reading his own poems. There are contributions from Bernard O’Donoghue and Rosie Lavan, co-editors the forthcoming Complete Poems, and Marco Sonzoghni, who edited The Translations of Seamus Heaney, as well as from other poets and academics, including Paula Meehan, a former Ireland Professor of Poetry, Leontia Flynn and Colm Tóibín. We also hear from members of Heaney’s family.
In “Seamus Heaney—Poet of Place”, John Kelly, who was inspired to become a poet by Heaney’s example and later became a friend, visits Bellaghy, where Heaney was born and is buried. ‘He never really left the parish,’ says his brother Dan. We are told about the literary influence of Patrick Kavanagh and Wordsworth, the former using local, agricultural subjects and place names and the latter drawing on direct experience to plot the growth of a poet’s mind. The local ‘hearth’ language—a mixture of English, Irish and Ulster Scots—is also identified as a key element of the poetry. There are interesting personal insights, too. Who would have guessed that the descending generations in “Digging”—a ‘big, rough navvy of a poem’ as Heaney described it—had been inspired by changing down the gears in his car on the way into Bellaghy, a fact that Heaney revealed at the unveiling of a bronze statue of a turf-cutter in the town? We are reminded of his almost rock-star status (usually more associated with eastern European poets) by hearing about a reading in Sligo, when the audience joined him in declaiming “Digging”.
“Seamus Heaney—Love Poet” begins with Heaney’s daughter, Catherine, (no longer ‘the little slapped palpable girl’ of “A Pillowed Head”) talking to her mother, Marie, in the kitchen of the family home in Dublin. Marie describes him as a loving person, who didn’t hold grudges, although at another kitchen table, in Glanmore Cottage, her brothers Michael and Christopher remember a rather more remote figure—‘He wasn’t a great man to take the football out.’ He did, though, make them a kite, not because he intended to write a poem about it, but because it was something he thought they should do (although their main memory is of the kite not flying). Heaney reads “The Blackbird of Glanmore” (‘It’s you, blackbird, I love’) and Paula Meehan explains the bird’s emblematic significance in Irish poetry. In 1983, Heaney presented Marie with a handwritten book, Poems for Marie, because he was embarrassed that he hadn’t thought to buy her a Christmas present that year. There were already enough love poems to fill a whole volume and he continued to write them until his death. We hear him read “Twice Shy”, which he wrote shortly after their first meeting, and Marie herself reads a later poem, “The Clothes Shrine”. She describes his last words, Noli timere (don’t be afraid), which he texted to her from outside the operating theatre where he died, as ‘an ultimate love poem’.
Gail McConnell, who teaches at The Seamus Heaney Centre, presents “Seamus Heaney—The Troubles”. Although she is from the other side of the religious divide (her father was murdered in front of the family home, when she was three and a half), she says that Heaney’s poems have had a profound and enduring presence in her imaginative life. Heaney was reluctant to be drawn into making statements about The Troubles and when the Sinn Féin spokesman, Danny Morrison, asked him, ‘When … are you going to write something for us?’ his answer was that if he wrote anything it would be for himself. The programme explains how Heaney’s approach to the subject changed from North in which he mythologises it—in the bog poems, in particular—to Field Work in which he takes a more personal, self-questioning approach. “The Harvest Bow” is not an overtly political poem, but as Colm Tóibín points out ‘using words … sonorously and conscientiously … so that something well-made comes out of this landscape’ is in itself a political act.
The last of the series, “Seamus Heaney—The Translator”, begins with a thud, as the poet, novelist and translator, Theo Dorgan, drops a copy of The Translations of Seamus Heaney onto his desk. (It weighs in at over 600 pages.) Most people were surprised that Heaney had translated so much, even allowing for big works, such as “Sweeney Astray”, “The Cure at Troy” and “Beowulf”. As Heaney explained, ‘lyric poetry isn’t a full-time job; you wait for the surges and hope that they will come’. In the meantime, he kept his hand in with translations. We hear how this affected his approach to his own poetry, work on “Sweeney Astray” bringing about a shift from Field Work, described as ‘a steady book’, to the new expansiveness and suppleness of Station Island and The Haw Lantern, and how he used translation as a way of obliquely commenting on the political moment. “Anything Can Happen”—about 9/11—is based on an ode by Horace and Bill Clinton famously quoted from A Cure at Troy about hope and history rhyming in a speech on the Northern Ireland peace process. Catherine visits her father’s study with its ‘translation corner’ and recalls how, on a family holiday to the south of France, he rigged up a makeshift desk in a garage, so that he could continue working on a translation of Dante. She says that he wrote the Golden Bough section of Book VI of Virgil’s The Aeneid in 1986 after the death of his father and returned to it again in 2006, following the birth of his first granddaughter (the end of Book VI looks forward to future generations of Romans). Dorgan comments that by projecting himself into a text that is ostensibly by another he makes his own of it, so that it’s both faithful to Virgil, but absolutely Heaney—something that’s true of all his translations.
RTÉ Arena’s Seamus Heaney 10th Anniversary is a 50-minute studio discussion, which covers much the same ground as the BBC programmes, but in what feels like a more discursive way. The contributors include Paula Meehan and Rosie Lavan again, as well as Chris Morash, the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College, the musician Neil Martin, who collaborated with Heaney, Professor Geraldine Higgins of Emory University and the poet and critic Blake Morrison. Heaney is described as a radiant spirit and a poet of ordinary miracles, who posed all the great questions and opened up thoughts in the back of our mind. Each of the contributors is asked to choose a poem read by Heaney, although annoyingly these have been cropped, so that we hear only a few lines of each. Gerard Manley Hopkins is identified as an early influence. It’s also pointed out how much of Heaney’s poetry draws on the first part of his life, until his mid-teens, when his family was living at Mossbawn. (Although he lived in Dublin for over 40 years, the city barely appears in his poetry.) It was interesting to hear that The National Library of Ireland has an exhibition of Heaney manuscripts, called Listen Now Again, at the Bank of Ireland and to learn how many revisions the bog poem, “Punishment”, had gone through, including a sonnet version. We hear, too, that “Lightenings” viii about a ship appearing to the monks of Clonmacnoise was one of Heaney’s favourites among his own poems.
Remembering Seamus Heaney (RTÉ lyric FM) is a series of 10 five-minute programmes in which different contributors choose their favourite Heaney poem and say something about it. In this case, we get the full poem read by the poet (the recordings being taken from the Collected Poems CD box set produced by RTÉ and the Lannan Foundation). All the poems are included in 100 Poems and feature favourites such as “Digging” and “Mid-Term Break”. The selectors include RTÉ presenter, Olivia O’Leary (who chose “Clearances” about Heaney’s mother and his negotiation between the local hearth language the lingua franca) and a schoolboy who won the Poetry Aloud verse-speaking competition with “Digging”. The poems often have a particular personal connection: the actor, Andrew Bennett, chose “Lightenings” vi and vii, because as a child he had a similar experience with cows as Thomas Hardy had getting down among sheep in a field; and the academic, Nicholas Allen, chose “Two Lorries” because his father was the manager of the bank blown up by the truck bomb referred to in the poem (fortunately, no one was seriously hurt). It begins with Michael Longley, who describes his first meeting with Heaney in Philip Hobsbaum’s flat in Belfast as ‘love at first sight’ and who chooses “The Harvest Bow” (‘a marvellous mixture of formalism and improvisation … about everything’). It ends touchingly with the artist, Colin Davidson, who painted Heaney’s portrait shortly before his death, choosing “Postscript”. Had he not decided on impulse to show Heaney the finished picture in June 2013, he would not have seen it: the official unveiling at Queen’s University happened the day after his funeral the following September.
These programmes are all well worth listening to, although the BBC’s are probably the most interesting and best put together. The comments about the poems and Heaney’s poetic development are illuminating, but perhaps the greatest value of the programmes lies in the insights provided by people who knew Heaney. The ten-year period allows some distancing to take place, but while many contemporaries and their memories are still alive.
(This review was published in the Spring 2024 issue of the Ver Poets members’ newsletter, Ver Poets Poetry World. To join Ver Poets and receive a free copy of the newsletter together with the other benefits of membership visit their website here.)
Stephen Claughton 