On the 10th anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney on August 30th, 2013, this brief remembrance finds me on my way to hear him read in the Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo. A bigger deal for me at the time than you might suppose. It is the mid-1980s, and I am an impoverished fine arts graduate living at home with my parents, in a country gripped by another of its cyclical social and economic collapses.
Bouncing along a potholed backroad on a hybrid motorcycle that is the only means of transport I can afford, I ride my part-road-bike and part-scrambler Honda XL125S from the coalmining valley of Arigna in north Roscommon to Sligo town and back.
The hardest part of the 80km round trip is the short, fraught passage in my leather jacket and biker-boots across the carpeted lobby, past a watchful guardian in the box office with a suspicious eye on my getup. Followed by a self-conscious squeeze through the well-heeled ranks of enculturated theatre goers and patrons to arrive at my seat in an auditorium abuzz with expectation.
[ How I learned to love Seamus Heaney’s poetryOpens in new window ]
Seamus Heaney is an openly enthusiastic guest of the Yeats International Summer School, perhaps because it is where one of his most insightful close readers and champions, the Harvard academic Helen Vendler, first heard him read and had her “heart blown open” by the experience. I can’t name the year of this Hawk’s Well reading with any certainty, but it is very soon after I stumbled on the work of Seamus Heaney on March 25th, 1984. I know the date because I wrote it in the flyleaf of the second-hand Faber & Faber copy of the Selected Poems (1965-1975) I’d just gotten my hands on.
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It’s no surprise the poet’s work had such a deep and immediate impact on me. Like Heaney, I am the son of farming stock and know what it’s like to dig potatoes with a spade and carry water in a bucket from a spring well. My grandfather Henry Joe’s workshop is crammed with the types of hand tools that proliferate in Heaney’s verse; pitchforks, hay-rakes, emery stone sharpened scythes, grit-polished trowels, spokeshave and spirit level.
My grandmother used the same style of ‘hooped and lidded’ barrel-churn as the one in the Heaney household, with the hole in the middle for the dash to pump standing crocks of creamy milk into pale country butter. In our household too, a steaming hot black iron kettle is deployed to scald the churn, and a bucketful of cold water is poured on the flagstone floor of the dairy to control the humidity.
I might even get to share these commonalities with Seamus Heaney when he sits in the foyer after the reading signing books with a fountain pen – a Conway Stewart perhaps. Books I can’t afford, and therefore skip the opportunity, and content myself with having had what already feels like a companionable evening in his company.
The reading had in fact been revelatory. With his merry-eyed gleam at the podium, his great charm and fluency, Heaney had expertly drawn me and his rapt audience into his vision of life and command of the language. His erudition. His deeply thought-through standpoint. His gift for capturing moments of ecstatic sufficiency in the here and now. And I am willing to bet that I was not alone in being led to believe that I knew not just Heaney’s poems, and the world preserved and shared within them, but the process, the sensibility, the train of thought that went into their making.
On the motorbike ride home after the event, I kept the clear perspex visor up on my full-face crash helmet. My solo headlight cut the euphoric summer half-light in two as I sped through becalmed pockets of warm night air where the road dipped, fragrant with honeysuckle perfume and newly mown summer meadows. Feeling more abundantly alive from having heard Seamus Heaney read. The poet and the public figure who never tired of pointing out that the carryover effects of great poetry are always life enhancing.
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