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  Click to listen to the programme |
Since winning the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, he has been quoted by world leaders, his new translation of "Beowulf" has become a best-seller and he has praised rapper Eminem for encouraging young people's interest in poetry.
But Heaney's latest book returns to the much darker territory he explored in the 'seventies, when the violence in Northern Ireland was his main preoccupation.
From poetry as a Door Into the Dark - the title of his second collection from 1968 - to poetry as a "door into the light" as he would describe it in interviews: the progression of Seamus Heaney's career over the past four decades has been remarkable. But where his recent collections basked in the heavenly light of Dante's Paradiso - one of Heaney's great examples - the new book, District and Circle, puts the poet with his two feet solidly back on earth.
"Yeah, bogging in again", he chuckles when I put this to him in a Rotterdam hotel. District and Circle returns to the boglands and rural Irish landscapes that dominated Heaney's poetry before he became a world citizen. It also brings back the protagonist of his most famous poem: "The Tollund Man."
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From Heaney's poem "The Tollund Man": Some day I will go to Aarhus |
Tribal rituals
Published at the height of the Northern Irish 'Troubles' in 1973, Heaney's meditation on a ritual murder in Iron Age Denmark was more than just a literary event. It was inspired by the archaeologist P.V. Glob, who wrote about the discovery of a man's body in a Danish bog in 1950 in his book The Bog People. Glob describes the body's miraculous preservation by the bog after more than twenty centuries, and speculates that the Tollund Man may have been a victim of human sacrifice.
The suggestion that these ancient tribal rituals could have anything to do with the everyday realities of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast and Derry outraged some critics. But the poem established Heaney as a leading voice of his generation.
B-boom
It is first of all a response to the intangible threats that this virtual world faces. Terrorism. Global warming. High-tech warfare as seen on CNN. "Of course you come to 'shock and awe', you come to Iraq, you come to a time when you were sitting watching TV and you went 'b-boom.' You're sitting in Dublin watching this hammering of the world by bombs and the young fellows are up there - 'ch-chk' - with impunity, letting it go."
But when Heaney does return to his own first place of home and memory in District and Circle, what he finds there is only more war: the Second World War, which began when he was just one year old, and Northern Ireland's own, violent conflict that ended in the 'nineties.
History and hope
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| Seamus Heaney speaking at Poetry International in Rotterdam |
"After the Berlin Wall had come down, after Mandela had got out, after the Velvet Revolution, after Poland, Czechoslovakia and so on. But at the time it was one of the bleakest moments in Ireland. There were terrible things happening, like the Greysteel massacre. So there was an element of refusal. Rather than anodyne, there was a defiance maybe in it, you know. But admittedly, it was then used by Mr Clinton."Looking back, Heaney still believes making hope and history rhyme is a "fair enough aspiration." But, he warns, "you cannot make any of these things stick as a job of poetry, you know. Poetry's job is to write the poem that is either beautiful or true or true and beautiful or surprising or ironic or whatever..."
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Tags: bog, catholics, clinton, ireland, literature, nationalists, Nobel, northern ireland, poetry, poetry international, protestants, rotterdam, Seamus Heaney, Tollund Man, troubles, UK, unionists