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{"title":"Seamus Heaney’s Audio Archive","authors":"Alex Alonso","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910474","url":null,"abstract":"Seamus Heaney’s Audio Archive Alex Alonso (bio) In 2009 as part of a weeklong program of events in honor of Seamus Heaney’s seventieth birthday, RTÉ released a fifteen-CD box set entitled Seamus Heaney: Collected Poems. It contained the poet’s readings of all eleven of his major volumes to that point, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to District and Circle (2006). On April 13th the twelve-hour recording was broadcast in its entirety on RTÉ Radio 1, followed by a program televised live from the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and the debut of Charlie McCarthy’s feature-length documentary Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous.1 These tributes represented not only a measure of Heaney’s standing and his work’s extraordinary connection with the public but also the culmination of a long and mutually rewarding relationship with Irish broadcasting. Before the arrival of this CD box set, the complete works of Heaney’s poetry had never been collected in one place. The whole project took more than a year to record; Heaney worked closely with the RTÉ producer and sound engineers as he went poem by poem, collection by collection, reading and recording for hours at a time.2 It says much that, still recovering from a severe stroke in 2006, he committed himself to such an arduous undertaking. The performance indicates how strongly he felt about his poetry’s [End Page 227] coexistence with sound media and the spoken word, reflecting his desire to leave behind what stands as, in effect, an audio archive of his work. Heaney’s evident regard for the spoken as well as the written trace is characteristic of a poet whose verse was tuned so carefully to his own vocal pitch and whose life and career were closely intertwined with radio from the beginning as both listener and broadcaster. Orality was always foundational to his writing, and toward the end of his life the poet seems to have been intent on ensuring that his printed words would not lose touch with their original vocal imprint. In his lectures and interviews, Heaney regularly appraised his poetic influences in auditory terms. Patrick Kavanagh, he writes, “walked into my ear like an old-style farmer walking a field” (SS 192); his admiration for T. S. Eliot stems from “the physicality of his ear” and the way his “intelligence exercise[s] itself in the activity of listening” (FK 37); Heaney celebrates Robert Frost’s verse for “its posture in the mouth and in the ear, its constant drama of tone and tune”; Ted Hughes’s poetry is favored over Philip Larkin’s for possessing “a bigger transmitter” (SS 339); the beginning of the Last Gospel at Mass sounds to him “like the first note of God’s tuning fork.”3 Discussing the composition of his formative early poem “Digging,” Heaney claimed that he was “responding to an entirely phonetic prompt, a kind of sonic chain dictated by the inner ear” (SS 82–83). Clearly he, like Frost, believed that “the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”4 As he explained to Dennis O’","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Diving for Crucibles”: Seamus Heaney, Barrie Cooke, and Bog Poems","authors":"Heather Clark","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910459","url":null,"abstract":"“Diving for Crucibles”: Seamus Heaney, Barrie Cooke, and Bog Poems Heather Clark (bio) by the time Seamus Heaney read The Bog People in 1969, with its arresting images of Iron Age corpses recovered from Danish bogs, he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “I was in a new field of force. . . . Opening P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People was like opening a gate.” But he spoke, too, of another crystallizing force: that of the expression-ist artist Barrie Cooke. It was Cooke who inspired Heaney to write “Bone Dreams” in the summer of 1972, “the first of those loose-link, zig-zaggy sequences that would eventually appear in North” (SS 157). In the mid-1970s Heaney collaborated with Cooke on Bog Poems, a limited edition published two weeks before Faber and Faber released North in 1975. The Barrie Cooke archive at Pembroke College, Cambridge, which opened in February 2022, reveals new details about the evolution of Bog Poems and North that suggest the prominent role Cooke played in Heaney’s controversial turn toward the mythic in 1971–74 as he was writing some of his most iconic poems. This new archive shows how Cooke’s and Ted Hughes’s friendship inspired Heaney to reorient his life toward personal and creative freedom in the Republic of Ireland in the early 1970s when he was increasingly troubled by political violence and beginning to feel the weight of his responsibilities as a northern Irish poet. The Cooke archive and the Heaney papers at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) shed particular light on Heaney’s use of female bog bodies in Bog Poems and North, and they point to a connection between Cooke’s interest in sheela-na-gigs and Heaney’s use of the aisling figure in poems like “Come to the Bower,” “Bog Queen,” “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” and “Act of Union.” Understanding Cooke’s role in Heaney’s life and art allows us to examine more critically what led Heaney to use passive, betrayed, murdered, and raped female bodies [End Page 14] as political metaphors. Drafts of “Bone Dreams,” “Punishment,” “Kinship,” “Tête Coupée” (later titled “Strange Fruit”), and the unpublished “Dark Rosaleen” in the Cooke and NLI archives point to Cooke’s influence—one that has only recently come into focus and that, I argue, contributed to Heaney’s attempt to transform the bog women of Jutland into aisling figures. But some of these drafts also suggest a revisionary process as Heaney retreats from Cooke’s mythic, ahistorical vision and moves closer to a historical, empathic view as he searched for ways to address the violence in Northern Ireland. He realized by 1973 that “abandoning history was a luxury that the times had disallowed” (SS 169). If Cooke’s influence led to what Edna Longley called “imaginative dead ends” in North,1 it also led Heaney to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, or what he called “Song and Suffering” (GT xii). This would become the defining theme of Heaney’s oeuvre, and it took root while he was collaborating with Barrie Cooke on Bog Po","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Introduction","authors":"Vera Kreilkamp","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910457","url":null,"abstract":"Editor’s Introduction Vera Kreilkamp Many in the english-speaking world remember that late summer day more than a decade ago when news of Seamus Heaney’s death reached us. A front-page article in the New York Times the next morning reported the loss of a poet whose mastery of language accompanied a remarkable sense of responsibility to his growing and sometimes grueling public role. Seamus Heaney: Afterlives focuses on the decade following Heaney’s death on 30 August 2013. The passage of time since has amplified his aesthetic and moral reach—offering new contexts and complexities to his achievement. Time has also made clear his enduring presence on an island he witnessed, sometimes with skepticism, transforming itself from the seemingly timeless rural community of his birthplace in the North to the globalized modern capital of Dublin in 2013. This special issue of Éire-Ireland contributes to the growing body of literary studies of Heaney’s writing but explicitly focuses on the afterlife period. Scholars explore recently available archival sources and forgotten publications and examine new institutional commemorations of his life. They also attend to the auditory and visual echoes of the presence Heaney left in recordings, radio broadcasts, and photographs as part of his legacy. In the issue’s nine interviews with poets publishing their first volumes after his death, the voices of younger Irish writers reflect on Heaney as a precursor—inspiring [End Page 5] them to discover their own subjects and styles as they respond to his accomplishments. As Annemarie Ní Churreáin writes, I’ll stumble across a phrase that excites my imagination or a word I want to sculpt into a title, only to be reminded, yet again, that he was here first. He rendered the thing so artfully that one has to be braced, doubly so, for the uphill push of making a thing shine newly. But that bracing, like many other types of restraint, can be exceptionally useful. For Nithy Kasa, We almost have to explain to ourselves that Heaney does not own these words: the “boglands” and the “prairies.” But this, in turn, only proves his mastery and his imprint on Irish literature. He’s very alive here in print and in conversations . . . already taking his place in our generation as the face of Irish poetry. Stephen Sexton observes that following Heaney as a poet offers a new freedom—and obligation: The poems are there, and now we have to find new ways to write about things. Heaney’s influence is tactfulness, responsibility. If you feel as if you have got something to say, do it as well and as compassionately as you can. In his Nobel Lecture “Crediting Poetry,” delivered in Stockholm in 1995, Heaney spoke about moving from the pre-reflective security of his childhood at Mossbawn, Co Derry, into the wideness of the world: into “the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival—whether in one’s poetry or one’s life—turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.” This iss","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"198 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nithy Kasa","authors":"Nithy Kasa, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910469","url":null,"abstract":"Nithy Kasa Nithy Kasa and Kelly Sullivan nithy kasa, a Congolese-Irish writer, is among the ten poets commissioned to write a poem for the Poetry as Commemoration project, an initiative of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at University College Dublin, with support from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport, and Media. She has also received an I bhFad i gCéin international residency for Cave Canem by Poetry Ireland, The Arts Council, and the Department of Foreign Affairs. Her debut collection Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho (Doire Press 2022) was included on the Irish Times’s list of the best poetry books of 2022. It is also shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023. Her work is featured on the University of Galway’s archive and the Special Collections of University College Dublin. ________ Nithy Kasa and Kelly Sullivan corresponded by email between January and August 2023. Their communication has been edited for clarity and length. kelly sullivan: When did you first begin writing poems? nithy kasa: Writing came naturally to me. I was always scribbling something, usually what I thought of as a song. But after I submitted a “poem” to the school magazine, suggestions to write followed. I never dreamed of my poems as a giving me a career—probably because we were warned that poets struggle to earn a living with little chance of making it. And most people who write poetry must also have a job, if at all possible as teachers/lecturers. So I was advised to find a career that would bring me a comfortable life, but to hold on to poetry for the love of it. [End Page 183] sullivan: When did you first encounter Seamus Heaney’s poetry? Your biography on several websites says you moved to Galway from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2005. I wonder if, like many young people in Ireland, you first read his work in the classroom in Galway? kasa: Yes, they taught Heaney, Yeats, Mahon, and Kavanagh among other poets. We read many of Heaney’s early Death of a Naturalist poems, each one explained line by line. “Mid-Term Break” was my favorite. I vividly remember my English teacher, a poet in his own right, breaking down that poem: “The baby cooed is onomatopoeia: when words sound like what they mean.” And he pointed how careful Heaney’s choices of words were in suiting the speaker or characters in his poems. To this day, “Mid-Term Break” is my reference poem for writing. sullivan: Your poetry is often about what we might call day-to-day rituals, sometimes in the form of memories or stories about your own family. You also focus on the natural world in your poems, often on nature as it links to ritual and custom—as in Heaney’s poetry. Do you think his work has touched the subject matter or tone of your poetry? kasa: I never thought of it. Most poetry is generally about day-today rituals—poems drawn from deep-felt experiences. Since I’m a country girl, I suppose my love for nature shows itself in my poetry: the peacefulness it","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"483 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited","authors":"Guy Beiner","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910460","url":null,"abstract":"Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited Guy Beiner (bio) “Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. . . . but there’s no knowing where a remembered image will lead you.” seamus heaney1 Dissertations, articles, and books have been written about the centrality of memory in Seamus Heaney’s writing. When it comes to historical memory, perhaps no poem in his oeuvre is more iconic than “Requiem for the Croppies,” in which Heaney succeeded—as acknowledged early on by Brendan Kennelly—in “compressing an entire period of history into fourteen lines.”2 A first-person recollection of the defeat of the United Irish rebels, nicknamed “Croppies” for their short hairstyle, the poem also signals the resurgence of their legacy. This fast-paced sonnet has been repeatedly recited at commemorations of the 1798 rebellion, particularly during the bicente-nary in 1998 when it was inscribed on monuments in Castlecomber, Co. Kilkenny; Curraha, Co. Meath; and Dundalk, Co. Louth.3 Yet, rather than providing a definitive memorial text, for Heaney it marked the beginning of a troubled creative engagement with the heritage of the United Irishmen, which was as much about disremembering as about remembering. The poem touches upon a hidden culture of social forgetting in which the poet himself was submerged even as he pursued imaginative attempts to challenge, if not quite countervail, its dominance. The traces of this uneasy engagement with memory can be found in Heaney’s published work, as well as [End Page 51] in drafts found in his archival manuscripts preserved in the National Library of Ireland that he could not bring himself to publish. The Memory of the Dead The Heaney family farm in the townland of Mossbawn and the parish of Bellaghy, Co. Derry, was just five miles away from Toombridge Co. Antrim, a site famously associated with the 1800 execution of the local United Irish folk hero Roddy McCorley (figure 1). Mossbawn was also three miles away from Castledawson, the ancestral seat of James Chichester-Clark, a unionist politician of Protestant Ascendancy lineage who would become prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1971. This sense of in-betweenness was meaningful for Heaney: “I had Roddy McCorley at Toome Bridge and I had the Chichester Clarks at Castledawson and since then I’ve thought of this as a symbolic placing for a Northern Catholic, to be in between the marks of nationalist local sentiment on the one hand, and the marks of colonial and British presence on the other.”4 Situated within this delicate balance, the traditions of Ninety-Eight with which he was familiar from childhood were not explicitly related to contemporary politics. Heaney described the household at Mossbawn as belonging to “the Papish rather than the Republican class” without “any hint of blistering Republican dogma.” Growing up, he would hear less about the Easter Rising of 1916 with its more","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Grace Wilentz","authors":"Grace Wilentz, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910471","url":null,"abstract":"Grace Wilentz Grace Wilentz and Kelly Sullivan grace wilentz was born in New York City. She moved to Ireland in 2005 to study the Irish language and became an Irish citizen in 2015. Educated in the United States, England, and Ireland, she worked with Seamus Heaney while an undergraduate at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Harvard Advocate, the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and on RTÉ radio. Wilentz’s first collection, The Limit of Light (The Gallery Press, 2020) was named one of the best books of the year by the Irish Independent and the Irish Times. She was recently awarded a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. ________ Grace Wilentz and Kelly Sullivan spoke in person over lunch in Greenwich Village, New York, in November 2022 and completed the interview through written correspondence. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: I was going to start the conversation with a question about your real-life interactions with Seamus Heaney. I would love to hear more about that. When did you first work with him? grace wilentz: In the early 2000’s, after Heaney’s Electric Light was published, I was a young poet, interested in tuning in to what was happening in poetry globally. At the time I was making my way through Heaney’s work, but it would be another few years before I graduated from high school, went off to college, and had the opportunity to work with Heaney. In September 2003, I started at Harvard, and the following semester I enrolled in my first creative writing course with the poet Peter Richards. Heaney was a visiting professor at the time although he’d stopped teaching undergraduate workshops by then. I remember [End Page 198] that he lived in Adams House and was known not only for being approachable, but actively friendly. I was disappointed that Heaney wasn’t teaching undergraduates anymore although he would offer a reading or a talk to the wider university community. Though graduate students in the English Department quietly nicknamed him “famous Seamus,” a lot of students didn’t read contemporary poetry or necessarily know who he was. I remember economics and computer science majors with stories of Heaney carrying his tray from the buffet to the long tables in the Adams House dining hall and asking if he could join them for lunch. They had great chats with him, even if they only learned later who he was. The opportunity to work with Heaney came as a total surprise to me. But to tell that story, I need to back up a little and give some context to my own journey with Irish poetry. I have no Irish roots, but in my house growing up there was great respect for Irish writing. I grew up in Greenwich Village where my dad, Eli Wilentz, ran a bookstore during the beat scene called The 8th Street Bookshop—and with his brother Ted also set up two small presses, Corinth Books and Totem Press. They collaborated with L","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe","authors":"Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910466","url":null,"abstract":"Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Kelly Sullivan nidhi zak/aria eipe is a poet, pacifist, and fabulist. Her first collection, Auguries of a Minor God, was published with Faber and Faber in 2021. “Incantation for the Hare” published here for the first time, was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s “The Names of the Hare,” his translation of the Middle English poem “Les Noms De Un Levre En Englais.” This incantatory poem formed part of Eipe’s research project Honey and the Hare, carried out during her tenure as the Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin in Spring 2023. She is poetry editor at Skein Press and contributing editor at The Stinging Fly. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke to Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe over Zoom on 9 March 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: Do you remember when you first read a Seamus Heaney poem? nidhi zak/aria eipe: I actually read his Nobel Laureate lecture before I read any of his poetry—during a phase in my life when I loved reading those speeches. The New Press published a collection of the laureate talks over twenty-five years. After that, the first Heaney poem I read was “Badgers” from Field Work, which I love because I’m a huge animal fan. sullivan: So you didn’t read Heaney in school? eipe: No. I did most of my schooling in India with a British Romantic-era literature curriculum.We read a lot of Blake, Keats, and Wordsworth and didn’t get exposure to many different kinds of poets. The [End Page 151] curriculum was strangely curated: we read one poem from each poet and period in an anthology of about thirty poems. My experience seemed similar to many people who only studied poetry in school: the formal way of writing poetry didn’t really appeal. What I did love was the mystical poetry I used to read: early Indian and Sufi poets in translation. I was in college before I was introduced to poets like Neruda, Lorca, Rilke, Miłosz, and Szymborska and started to encounter poetry more widely. sullivan: And were you writing yourself? Or did you really begin writing poetry after you encountered another world different from the British romantic poems you read in school? eipe: I wasn’t writing poetry myself. I used to experiment with all kinds of genres, but poetry was the one that I didn’t ever think I could write; every time I did write a poem, it fell short of what I envisioned in my head. I wrote a few poems in high school but didn’t ever consider myself a poet. The turning point for me was when my mother died, quite suddenly, five years ago. Soon after I lost the ability to write anything, which was a very strange experience for me because I’ve always had been able to express myself through language. After she died, I found that my link to English—actually my mother tongue—disappeared. And so I had to feel my way into writing and into language again; that’s when poetry actually happened for me. sullivan: So quite ","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gail McConnell","authors":"Gail McConnell, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910467","url":null,"abstract":"Gail McConnell Gail McConnell and Kelly Sullivan gail mcconnell is a Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast. She is interested in living with the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness, and the politics of language and form. Her debut poetry book The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, the poetry pamphlets Fothermather and Fourteen, made two arts features based on her poetry, and presented a program on Seamus Heaney for BBC Radio 4. ________ Kelly Sullivan interviewed Gail McConnell by Zoom on 16 February 2023. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. kelly sullivan: I’ve been starting with a general question. You grew up in Belfast. Do you remember when you first encountered Heaney’s poetry? gail mcconnell: I probably first encountered his poetry in secondary school at about fourteen. And I’d say the poem we read first was “Mid-Term Break,” a classic on the syllabus for people of that age. We also read poems like “Digging,” “Personal Helicon,” or “Bogland”—those early, mid-and late-sixties poems. Our image of Heaney was of somebody who came from where we came from: Northern Ireland rather than the south. And we heard the classic stuff about rural life, probably read Heaney alongside a poet like Robert Frost, and thought about the life of a farmer. I think we read more Heaney poetry than I can specifically remember because I often describe to my students a feeling of “Heaney fatigue” that people have when they’ve come through Irish schools. [End Page 162] Many young people who have read Heaney until they leave school encounter him at university and think “a Heaney poem again!” And the version of the poet they’ve been given is uncomplicated—not particularly political or not political in a complicated way: he was Catholic, and nationalist, and he represented that community. And he was one of the first people from his background to achieve global standing. But politics and controversies weren’t central—rather the Heaney of “Digging” and the agricultural and imaginative labor he wrote about. sullivan: I’m really struck by what you said about Heaney fatigue. Do you encounter that with your students who come into the program now? And do you teach Heaney? Do you put Heaney poems on your syllabi? Or are you saying, we’re not going to talk about this figure anymore, even though you’re at the Heaney Centre? mcconnell: No, we do teach Heaney. You can’t not. But Irish and American criticism has responded quite differently to Heaney’s legacy. And some of the critiques over the decades have been harsher in Belfast and in the North than they have been in the States. So with a book like North that we teach for the M.A. in poetry, you’ve got Ciaran Carson calling Seamus Heaney a “laureate of violence” and, in the same issue of the Hone","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seán Hewitt","authors":"Seán Hewitt, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910465","url":null,"abstract":"Seán Hewitt Seán Hewitt and Kelly Sullivan tongues of fire, Seán Hewitt’s debut collection published by Jonathan Cape, won the Laurel Prize for ecopoetry in 2021. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Penguin USA) came out in 2022 and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature that year. His second poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, will be published in 2024. He also published an academic monograph J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021). Hewitt grew up in Warrington, England, and is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin. In 2023 he was elected to the Royal Society of Literature. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke to Seán Hewitt via Zoom on 30 January 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. KELLY SULLIVAN: Do you do you remember when you first read Heaney, and do you remember feeling any kind of connection to the poems—or was it just something you had to do for school? HEWITT: We first read Heaney as part of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). I think the poems were all from Death of a Naturalist—the big ones. The title poem, “Mid-Term Break” and “Digging” are the three I remember most clearly. What struck me about “Death of a Naturalist” was the earthiness of the language. Looking back, it seems as if it had an erotic—very sensuous— language. That struck me as different from the other poets we looked at who are quite plain spoken; Simon Armitage, Carol Anne Duffy, and Philip Larkin came from a different place with more obvious humor or plain speech. I liked the music of Heaney, but those other two poems, “Mid-Term Break” and “Digging,” are so present that they feel clichéd for me now. I know them so well that I kind of run away from them. But “Death of a Naturalist” still holds its [End Page 142] resonance—more elusive without that wrapped-up ending that the other two have. SULLIVAN: Did you, growing up in Britain, think of Heaney as an Irish poet or was he just another lyric poet when you first encountered him? HEWITT: I definitely thought of Heaney as an Irish poet. But I question that now because I wonder, was he presented to us in our anthology as a British poet? I remember there were four poets that we read, and he was the only one who wasn’t British. But he may have been presented to us as that in a four-nation sort of anthology: Gillian Clarke, a Welsh poet; Carol Anne Duffy, Scottish; Simon Armitage, English; and Seamus Heaney, northern Irish. So although I thought of him as Irish, I think he was presented as part of UK poetry. But, yes, I was aware of him as a northern Irish poet. SULLIVAN: Do you remember when you started to read Heaney’s work on your own or sought him out as a poet? HEWITT: It would probably have been in my second year of university that I first picked up his books. I used to shop in charity shops, never in bookstores, which meant that for a long time my poetry reading was in the classics like Tennyson or Wordsworth. Where I ","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Seamus Heaney Archives","authors":"Rand Brandes","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910458","url":null,"abstract":"The Seamus Heaney Archives Rand Brandes (bio) An Origin Story The afterlife of the major Seamus Heaney archives, those used by several scholars in this issue and around the world, did not begin when Emory University’s Rose Library and the National Library of Ireland (NLI) received their boxes of correspondence and manuscripts. These archives emerged without teams of white-gloved specialists going through drawers and closets or sifting through random stacks of disorganized papers. When both libraries received the post-appraisal materials from Heaney’s attic study, the archival process had been ongoing for several years. The poet was able to keep his own writing house in order, but finally things had reached a tipping point and he agreed to let me help with some of the heavy lifting in 1993. I had already been working in the top floor of his Dublin home on Sandymount Strand for a few years. This attic, accessed by a narrow winding staircase (think Yeats’s tower), was his writing space as well as his poetry library with a small window at one end. In the late 1980s Heaney had opened this space to me for occasional lodging and, more importantly, for the research I was doing with Michael Durkan on Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide.1 After a few visits, I became increasingly more worried than Heaney about the mounds of paper and stacks of notebooks covering every surface, including the floor (figure 1). Following several intense family discussions, which included Heaney’s expressing a sense of being “over-exposed” in public and literary arenas, we agreed on a plan for me to assist him in [End Page 7] “rationalizing” (his word) the attic and his papers. In September 1993, after I received a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Dublin with him, we began the process of preparing the papers in his home for eventual relocation. We first dismantled the attic studio he had been using since 1976. I physically assisted in the demolition and renovation process, bringing in file cabinets and other storage units, and we began the process of organizing, cataloging, and preserving his manuscripts from the 1950s forward. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Seamus Heaney’s Desk, 1993. Photograph by Rand Brandes. When Heaney turned fifty in 1989, he had been publishing for thirty years and had been teaching at Harvard for eleven. By 1993 he had composed fifteen volumes of poetry (including selected poems), three collections of prose works, and one verse play, and he had edited several anthologies, one with Ted Hughes. In addition to the drafts that went into the published works, there were mounds of unpublished manuscripts; correspondence, both personal and administrative; and stacks of unsolicited manuscripts in the corners of his studio. His publications claimed their territories, accompanied by hundreds of reviews clipped out of newspapers and magazines by [End Page 8] professional clipping services—sent “compliments of the publisher” in large canvas maili","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"202 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}