‘Every poet should aspire to be like him’
My generation was born to poetry under his rising star. We watched in wonder as his star became fixed above the planet of poets. We were amazed at the sureness of his touch on the gears of an Ulster talent that kept him aloft, like a rescue helicopter hovering majestically over the battlefields of world poetry. Sometimes he landed in our patch of the field, distributing the medicine of his words, before flying away again. He was kind and generous, big-hearted but capable of severity. For a portion of each year he suffered fools gladly, but always sidled away graciously, never giving offence, but determined to save himself. From the beginning he knew the price of fame and he was always willing to pay its full tribute of endless prefaces, epitaphs, openings and introductions. His heart was literally shredded in the insatiable mire of his admirers, admirers that included me and a thousand other poets.
Seamus was generous to a fault, with a generous farming instinct that owed so much to his family and his townland of Mossbawn, Co Derry. Born into a farming society that knew everything of the meitheal and the Co-Op, he was at ease with everyone through his entire life. He loved to tell the story of his time eating in a restaurant with his extended family in the weeks after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: how the locals didn’t bother him, leaving him alone with his siblings to eat and talk: but now and again they would pass by his table to squeeze his arm or shoulder, muttering ‘Well done,’ ‘good, man, good man,’ as if he’d scored the winning point in a County Final. In that country restaurant he could sense the community pride in the air, a sense of pride that was, for him, simply golden because it was local. He was a highly-educated, scholarly man, a teacher at Queens University and Carysfort College and, later, Boylston Professor at Harvard; but in his scholarship he wished to exclude nobody. Inclusiveness was his deepest, democratic instinct. In this, he was most like those other greats, Peadar O’Donnell and John McGahern.
I’ll never forget that day in October, 1995, when a colleague at the City Library’s reference desk said ‘Did you hear about Heaney? He’s won the Nobel Prize.’ It was one of the most extraordinary days in our lives; our own Heaney had joined the ranks of Neruda, Camus and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The first borrower I told was an old Republican activist who stepped back from the desk, removed his trilby, bowed and said ‘A great day for Ireland. God bless dem Swedes!’ Tears of national pride welled up in our eyes. It was as great as the day Stephen Roche won the Tour de France. We walked on air because of him.
A few years later, during Cork’s magnificent stint as European Capital of Culture, I took Seamus and his wife, Marie, on a grand tour of Cork, visiting the hills of Montenotte and Sundays Well, the Marina, Fitzgerald’s Park, the Lough and UCC. They were stunned by the unseen breadth of Cork. Two days later there was a letter, with a poem on libraries by Milosz, from Strand Road: “I feel Cork has opened up for me, Tom.” At the end of last year, we walked with Seamus and Marie behind the coffin of the much younger Tipperary poet, Dennis O’Driscoll. By then Seamus had grown much more frail. His hands shook as he delivered a magnificent oration. That day his grief and sense of loss was palpable, urgent and ominous. To Dennis O’Driscoll we owe the greatest debt within Seamus Heaney biography: O’Driscoll’s monumental, book-length interview, Stepping Stones, is as close as we will ever get to the soul of our Nobel Laureate.
Seamus Heaney lived a poet’s life to the full. He knew the place of the poet in Irish history and he knew how poets continue to engage in a confident dialogue with politics and power; yet, as he said to Dennis O’Driscoll “I had...a kind of perverse drive not to trade, even in my own eyes, on the safe conduct that the word ‘poet’ might provide.” In books like Wintering Out, District and Circle and Human Chain, he brought us the old man-killing parishes, the clunk of the baler working long into the evening, or the Slack schlock/ Scuttle scuffle,/ Shak-shak of the homely bucket of slack banking the winter fires. Precision like his is what every poet should aspire to command. His death has robbed us of the master poet and the true servant of history.
