Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney and the dullness of “Grey Cement”…

Terry Maguire on June 13, 2020, 7:10 am

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One wintery evening in the early 1970s, a RTE film crew arrived at my boarding school, St Columb’s College on Bishop Street in Derry, to make a TV documentary. It was rare excitement in the boredom and routine that defined the boarders’ lives. The subject of the documentary was an ex-boarder, the poet Seamus Heaney. One scene involved an actor – or perhaps it was the poet himself –sneaking down the wrought-iron fire-escape attached to the grey-stoned gable of Senior …

Heaney, a short afterword: “wasn’t it the job of the poet to roar in indignation?”

Mick Fealty on September 6, 2013, 8:53 pm

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…surely every dweller in the country must hope that the governments involved in its governance can devise institutions which will allow that partition to become a bit more like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing for agile give-and-take, for encounter and contending, prefiguring a future where the vitality that flowed in the beginning from those bracing words “enemy” and “allies” might finally derive from a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary. Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Speech, 1995 …

Seamus Heaney: “But what about the river in the trees, boy?”

Pete Baker on August 30, 2013, 2:27 pm

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Seamus Heaney has died at the age of 74. The Slugger archive has a number of Heaney-related posts, although some links may be defunct. Among them one of my earliest posts noting Heaney writing on his fellow poet Czeslaw Milosz. More here, here, here, here, and here. And here’s a great montage of BBC archive clips from 2009 of “Digging”. [Photo credit: Felix Clay] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzJgbNANzk?hl=en_GB&version=3&w=560&h=420] And a quote noted back in 2006. Sitting comfortably at last in the country-like kitchen of …

Is Heaney right when he talks about us having ‘caste politics’?

Mick Fealty on January 30, 2013, 9:08 am

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I was wondering if in my absence yesterday someone on the Slugger team might have picked up the gauntlet thrown down so casually by the south Derry Nobel Lauret, Seamus Heaney. It seems not. In an interview with the Times it seems the poet doesn’t think there is going to be a united Ireland. In fact this may have been the least interesting thing he had to say. According to the Irish News, he also noted… Loyalism, or unionism, or …