After 2013: Poems and Poets in Conversation

Abstract

After 2013: Poems and Poets in Conversation* Kelly Sullivan (bio) This special issue focusing on the legacy of Seamus Heaney a decade after his death features interviews with nine poets about his influence and his continuing presence in Irish culture. These poets also contribute new work that show their diverse range of styles. They were selected with one specific criteria in mind: each published a first full-length collection after Seamus Heaney’s death in 2013. Several have already released a second collection or have one forthcoming, and many were educated and mentored by poets who worked with Heaney. Collectively, they represent an exciting new generation of poets and show how poetry from Ireland has changed over the last decades. Although the writers I interviewed are publicly associated with Irish literary culture, not all of them grew up in Ireland or Northern Ireland. They thus reflect the changing face of publishing on the island, with names and backgrounds that differ from what we may have thought of as Irish twenty years or even a decade ago. More than a third of the poets were born and grew up in other countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United States, and India—reflecting a shift from centuries of outward migration. Several serve as book publishers or as editors of journals, including Poetry Ireland Review and The Stinging Fly. In such roles, they help expand access to publishing through initiatives like Skein Press’s Play It Forward Fellowships. Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe describes this work as “trying to break down barriers for people, but also to challenge the [End Page 137] literary and art sectors to expand the idea of what Irish culture is: to be more reflective of the contemporary and cosmopolitan society in which we live.” Nearly all of the poets interviewed first encountered Seamus Heaney in secondary school, mostly through studying for the Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate qualifications or on the A-level exams in Northern Ireland that determine where students will be placed in higher education. Generally, they first studied Heaney’s early pastoral poems from Death of a Naturalist, and for some, reading Heaney in school was a life-changing experience. Victoria Kennefick described the hush and attention that fell across all grade levels at her small, one-room national school when her teacher read “Mid-Term Break.” Heaney’s ubiquitous presence on the literary curricula of secondary schools throughout the island meant that for these writers—and indeed, for a generation of readers, as Stephen Sexton puts it—”the idea of an Irish poem is pretty much a Heaney poem.” But a few of the poets spoke of their need to break through what they experienced as a sometimes inhibiting association of Heaney’s style with the Irish lyric. Ultimately, however, they suggest that such an early influence helped shape their sense of the power and of the restraint required of that form. A few others had unusual encounters with Heaney and his poetry. For Grace Wilentz, Seamus Heaney was one of many poets she read as a teenager growing up in the West Village of New York City. Later, when she attended Harvard University, she informally worked with him on translating poems from the Irish, a fortunate encounter that influenced her own work as a poet. Wilentz’s work testifies to her carefully tuned ear and her dedication to finding a precise image or sound—skills sharpened in working with Heaney. Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe received most of her early education in India and encountered Heaney through reading his Nobel Prize speech. Poetry in her secondary school covered only the British Romantics, and she did not begin writing her own poems until after she moved to Ireland in 2017. Remarkably, Faber and Faber published her first book only four years later. Those interviewed here also show the stylistic range of contemporary Irish poetry that reflects Heaney’s interest in questioning what the lyric can do and how we might recreate it. Eipe plays with formal [End Page 138] innovation and with concrete—or more visually grounded—poetry. Her debut collection, Auguries of a Minor God, uses mathematical sequences to organize the long...