SEAMUS HEANEY AND HIS LEGACY
...I spent last week in Belfast week at the Seamus Heaney Conference and Commemoration hosted by Queen's University's Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry...Belfast.2014.4 is a fascinating, accessible city growing in confidence and optimism about its future but still struggling with its legacy and how to best deal with it...when Sharon and I first drove through Belfast in 1994 it was an ominous, scary place that we could not get out of fast enough...while things may not yet have "changed, changed utterly" in Yeats' term, the positive changes brought about by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement are quite dramatic...we could walk anywhere night or day without fear of danger...most of the pubs are now wholly integrated religiously, gender-wise, and in all other respects...there is an abundance of delectable restaurants of infinite variety (though they still close too early)...and the city has a definite "vibe" to it..
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| Queen's University - Langford Hall |
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| Queen's University courtyard |
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| Belfast City Hall (West front) |
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| City Hall - interior rotunda |
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| Silver cross in St. Ann's Cathedral |
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| Street mural in West Belfast |
...Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureatte who died last year, is revered as a universal figure, perhaps the only one, in Ireland...Digging is perhaps his best-known poem but others are of equal power, such as The Tollund Man, Death of a Naturalist, Follower, Mid-Term Break, Station Island, The Otter, Requiem for the Croppies, or Postscript...in a keynote lecture the noted literary critic Peter McDonald spent an hour and a half deconstructing a single poem, The Harvest Bow, which I had never read or heard of...when asked later what I thought of McDonald's presentation, I responded that I left the lecture thinking The Harvest Bow was the greatest poem Heaney ever wrote...
...one afternoon we embarked on a tour into the Derry countryside to visit Heaney's home townland, Ballaghy...Heaney was raised on a farm and wrote often about his family and the farm and the strong values it gave him...
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down...
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But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
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Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
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| Sculpture of turf digger - Heaney museum, Bellaghy, Co. Derry |
...Heaney was sometimes criticized, alternately and inconsistently, for not directly condemning (take your pick) either a) the British security apparatus or b) the IRA, yet anyone who made the effort to read his poetry would know that he wrote movingly and effectively about the impact his country's difficulties had on him as a Catholic from rural County Derry who attended Queens University...Seamus' best friend, collaborator, and friendly competitor was the Protestant poet Michael Longley, who described their friendship as that of an "agnostic Catholic" and an "atheistic Protestant"...I was privileged to meet Heaney once and can attest to his special aura, his reassuring presence of being, his universal appeal as a person as much as a poet...
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| Seamus and Marie Heaney, 2007 |
...I am also fortunate enough to have become friends with Michael and Edna Longley, a leading literary critic in her own right who helped organize the conference...Edna and Michael have been extremely kind and encouraging to me in welcoming me into their wonderful literary world, often over several pints of Guinness, which both of them also love...
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| Michael Longley |
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| Edna Longley |
..the collective psyche of Belfast is still strongly influenced by the so-called "Troubles" of the recent past and the people are still purging their emotions and real pain from that era...I went to the Lyric Theater to see Quietly, a new play by playwright Owen McCafferty which focuses on two middle-aged men - a Catholic and a Protestant - who reluctantly meet in a bar to try to come to terms with their violent past...a difficult, hard, but excellent performance which ended with the audience virtually exploding out of their seats in applause and catharsis...only one other time have I experienced such emotion at the end of a performance, when the first act of Riverdance concluded during its premier run in Radio City Music Hall...
...I must add that a highlight of the visit was the cask-conditioned Irish ale Scullions sampled in the iconic Crown Bar and Liquor Saloon...a real treat for your Brewmeister's taste buds...since this delectable is not available anywhere outside the Crown, my recommendation for April is Alewerks American Ale...so grab yourself a copies of one or two of Seamus' poems and your favorite brew (or other libation of choice) and raise a glass to the poets in all of us...
[Please note: all photographs by Peter Kissel; all rights reserved]
- the Brewmeister -
