Heaney’s second, and final, act
THE first volume of Seamus Heaney’s selected poems, New Selected, Poems 1966-1987, has now been followed by the second volume, New Selected Poems, 1988-2013, which begins with poems from Seeing Things (1991) and continues to his last collection, Human Chain (2010), and to a final, poignant poem written in the month of his death — ‘Listening to Bach I saw you years from now (More years than I’ll be allowed) Your toddler wobbles gone, A sure and grown woman. Your bare foot on the floor Keeps me in step..........’
That poem, ‘In Time’, is a grandfather’s joyful prayer for his granddaughter, Síofra. The tapping on the cement floor is a metaphor of how all things are balanced in family life: we are all earthed in family ‘we foot.... lightly/ In time...’ While that last poem was written as a hymn to childhood and regeneration, it acts now as a perfect epitaph.
