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{"title":"Photographing Seamus","authors":"Bobbie Hanvey","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910475","url":null,"abstract":"Photographing Seamus Bobbie Hanvey in 1972 I was living in Cassidy’s Flats at 124 Saul Street, Down-patrick, Co. Down, and still working as a psychiatric nurse in the Downshire Hospital. There was plenty of room in Cassidy’s Flats: a big living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, and another big room that I turned into a darkroom. I spent most of my time in there. A pot of fresh vegetable soup was simmering on the stove with the marrow from the bone stamping its authority on the bubbling brew. Snowflakes melted on the footpath outside, but nobody noticed. The kitchen door swung open, and the tall, mighty frame of my good friend, the filmmaker, broadcaster, and folk singer David Hammond wearing big shiny boots and a tweed cap stepped in. “Bobbie, meet Seamus Heaney,” he said. “Doctor Hanvey, I presume!” “Near enough, Seamus. You’re very welcome to Saul Street. Would yourself and David like a bowl of soup?” “Now you’re talking,” said Seamus. “That’s a big pot, I might take two,” laughed Hammond. And he did! As a flurry of white bread was being broken and quickly dipped in soup, Seamus told me that he and his wife Marie were moving to live near Ashford in County Wicklow where they had rented a house. He would need his car taxed in Northern Ireland, and since there was a tax office in Downpatrick, he asked if I would do the needful and tax it for him every year for the next three years. I said that wouldn’t be a problem and I would be delighted to do so. At that time, it was cheaper to tax your car in Northern Ireland than in the Irish Republic. After visiting the tax office and collecting the disc for Seamus’s first car—a second-hand, dark-blue Volkswagen Beetle, registration [End Page 249] number JI 5751—I hot-footed it to the local post office, and within an hour or so it was on its way to County Wicklow. In 1979 I photographed his wife Marie’s sister Helen’s wedding in Dublin, and in 1985 I wrote Seamus a note. Dear Seamus, I hope your car is going well. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the times when I got it taxed when you hadn’t a penny! I was sorry to hear that your clutch packed in near Athy in County Kildare. Do you think a photo-session at a time of your choosing would be possible? Love to Marie. Yours sincerely, Bobbie I photographed Seamus many times down the years, and one of my favorite shots of him features on the cover of the book Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll. The others that I liked were those where he wore his father’s jacket, topcoat, hat, and Wellington boots and carried his walking stick (see figures 4, 5, and 6). These were taken in a peat bog near Bellaghy, Co. Derry, where he grew up. Ten years after the bog session I met up with Seamus at a family wedding. “Bobbie, do you remember the day when you photographed me wearing my father’s gear?” “Yes, I do. Soft oul’ rain on the sod that day.” “Well, what I want to say to you is, you would never get me to do that again.” “Fair enough, Seamus, but dress","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"7 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":"135532238","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":"Seamus Heaney: Afterlives in Ireland’s Public Domain","authors":"Maureen Kennelly","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910463","url":null,"abstract":"Seamus Heaney: Afterlives in Ireland’s Public Domain Maureen Kennelly (bio) More than any other artist of his generation, Seamus Heaney naturalized the art of poetry in everyday life. I begin by tracing his moral and aesthetic grounding in his rural Irish roots—but then consider why Heaney’s work remains so fully a part of Irish consciousness a full decade after his death. Through their enduring afterlives presence, Heaney’s words have increasingly become threaded into the public domain, a phenomenon visible not only in Ireland’s response to its 2013 loss, but also in the founding of a range of exhibitions and institutions devoted to exploring, displaying, and supporting his influence on Irish society—including the work of countless visual arts and musicians. In “Something to Write Home About,” an early essay in Finders Keepers (51–62), Heaney recalls how as a toddler he had removed the slats from his cot, remembering the contact that his warm feet made with the cold floor. He remembers the “immediate sensation of surprise; and then something deeper, more gradual, a sensation of consolidation and familiarity, the whole reassuring foundation of the earth coming up into you” (55). He continues, describing the feeling of being in two places at once—and the sensation of finding a space inside himself that he could still enter years after through the memory of his feet on the cold cement. This sense of groundedness is also reflected in “The Loose Box” in Electric Light: “You’ve found your feet in what ‘surefooted’ means / And in the ground of your own understanding—” (15). “In Time,” a poem dedicated to a new granddaughter Síofra and first published in The New Yorker soon after his death, again refers to that grounded sensation Heaney recalls from his own childhood: Your bare foot on the floorKeeps me in step; the powerI first felt come up through [End Page 128] Our cement floor long agoPalps your sole and heelAnd earths you here for real.1 Popular Afterlives Evidence of Heaney’s influence in the public domain might be found in the behavior of those who attended Croke Park on 2 September 2013 for the All-Ireland National Gaelic Football semifinal championship. In a moment expressing the grief of a nation, eighty thousand football fans stood in a hushed silence—and then applause—in Dublin’s national sporting stadium just two days after the poet’s death. Heaney was revered for many reasons in Ireland, and although the announcer acclaimed the poet for his literary accomplishments, he also affectionately noted that Heaney had played junior football in Castledawson as a boy.2 No stranger to such large sporting arenas, Heaney had appeared, with the Russian poet Andrei Voznesenski, at a series of immense basketball stadiums in the course of a career of public readings that forged deep connections with huge audiences in Ireland—and worldwide. The final line of Heaney’s midcareer poem “Alphabets” focuses on the artistry of a Bellaghy craftsman on the family ga","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"10 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":"135532239","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":"Annemarie Ní Churreáin","authors":"Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910472","url":null,"abstract":"Annemarie Ní Churreáin Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Kelly Sullivan annemarie ní churreáin is from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her collections include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). She is a recipient of the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award, a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award and a former literary fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany). Ní Churreáin is editor of issue 140 of Poetry Ireland Review and she is the new poetry editor of The Stinging Fly. ________ Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Kelly Sullivan communicated by email between April and August 2023. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. kelly sullivan: Do you remember when you first encountered Heaney’s poetry? annemarie ní churreáin: My first encounter with Heaney was through “Mid-Term Break” (Death of A Naturalist, 1966). I was a schoolgirl living at home with my family in northwest Donegal and my parents, who were also foster carers, had recently relinquished a young infant from their care. I remember that overnight the house fell into a deep, flowering quiet. I packed away the infant cot, the blankets, the bottle sterilizing equipment into the attic. It was not, of course, a death, but it was a deathly absence. What I recognized in Heaney’s poem was what it means to be a child among adults bewildered by grief. When I later sat with North in my hands I was not yet old enough to absorb the full impact of the poems, but I found myself every bit as moved by the solemnity of the body laid out in the bog as I had been by the solemnity of the deceased child laid out in the coffin. These were my first early lessons in language as ceremony. [End Page 209] sullivan: Were you actively working on your own poetry at that time? ní churreáin: I was not actively working on my first poetry collection until I undertook an M.Phil. in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin in 2009, but even as a child I’d been in the habit of tinkering with language. Gaeilge (Irish) is my first tongue, and living between it and English gave me an early instinct for the transformative nature of language. It also rooted in me the sense that language is of a place. I grew up in the 1980s, flanked on one side by the Atlantic Ocean and on the other by a troubled political border, so I was alert to what language under pressure sounds like. It was a landscape full of shadows and echoes, and it exposed me to the relationship between story and place. At the same time, the people I was raised among were mostly preoccupied with the ordinary, day-to-day challenges of trying to survive. My father cut turf, fished on trawlers, brought milk from house to house. My mother hosted Irish-language students and in the off-season months knit Aran jumpers to order. To this day I’m drawn to take whatever raw material I have at hand and to make out of it a thing by which I can survive. Poetry has always been an extension of the pla","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":"135532243","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":"After 2013: Poems and Poets in Conversation","authors":"Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910464","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"61 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":"135532532","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":"Julie Morrissy","authors":"Julie Morrissy, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910470","url":null,"abstract":"Julie Morrissy Julie Morrissy and Kelly Sullivan julie morrissy, with degrees in creative writing, law, and literature, was the first Poet-in-Residence at the National Library of Ireland. Her project Radical! Women and the Irish Revolution comprises a poetry pamphlet and a podcast series. She has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newman Fellowship, the Arts Council of Ireland “Next Generation” Award, and the MAKE Theatre Award. Her first collection, Where, the Mile End, was published by Book*hug Press (Canada) and tall-lighthouse (United Kingdom). She will deliver the 2023 Hibernian Lecture at the University of Notre Dame. ________ Julie Morrissy and Kelly Sullivan spoke via Zoom on 23 January 2023 and again in September. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: Since you grew up in Ireland, I imagine you knew about Seamus Heaney as a poet early on, but do you remember when you first encountered his poetry? julie morrissy:: I do remember because he was on my Leaving Certificate course and probably also on my Junior Certificate course for students in their early teens. That would have been the first time that I consciously encountered his work and spent time studying it. But he was in the orbit here as well. I was aware of Heaney before I was teenager—especially because my grandparents had lived in the North and loved poetry. I think for Junior Cert “Mid-Term Break” was on the course, and for Leaving Certificate I remember “Twice Shy” and “Badger.” [End Page 189] sullivan:: You mentioned that your grandparents were from the North. Did you think of Heaney as a poet from the North at that time? morrissy:: Yes, since that was the way my teachers framed him on the Leaving Certificate course. The poets that my teacher selected for us—which may be different for someone else of my generation —were Heaney, Michael Longley, and Eavan Boland. Longley and Heaney were taught in conversation with each other, and themes about Northern Ireland were emphasized in their work and in relation to each other’s work—whereas Boland was taught separately. sullivan:: Although Heaney’s early work seems so connected to his northern Irish identity, his language and sound moves into something more like an international style. I was thinking about that change in Heaney in relation to your poetry and particularly your first book, Where, the Mile End, which is very international—geographically but also stylistically. morrissy: Much of the internationalism and mobility in my poetry probably comes from my experience of living in other places. When I was younger, I was very North American focused with literature. The only time I intently studied Irish poetry was for the Leaving Certificate. I went from that to earning a North American literature M.A. and then a doctorate in creative writing which was not specifically concentrated on Irish Studies—although Irish literature of course informed the work. The Leaving Certifica","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"24 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":"135532533","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":"Seamus Heaney’s Desks: Stages of Writing","authors":"Geraldine Higgins","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910462","url":null,"abstract":"Seamus Heaney’s Desks: Stages of Writing Geraldine Higgins (bio) “I never used to understand why anyone wants to visit a writer’s house: aren’t the books enough? What would you really learn by staring at Martin Amis’s desk or Philip Roth’s kitchen table?”1 recalling his travels with Seamus Heaney in a memorial tribute, Andrew O’Hagan describes a visit to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Scotland that featured an exhibition called The Tam O’Shanter Experience. Their friend Karl Miller joked that there would one day be a “Seamus Heaney Experience.” Heaney replied, “That’s right. It’ll be a few churns and a confessional box.”2 Now, ten years after his death, fans of the poet can visit two such Irish “Experiences”: Bellaghy’s Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Northern Ireland and Dublin’s Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again in the Republic (figure 1; figure 2). The locations of each bookend the poet’s life, representing the roots and the branches, as it were, of his early years on the farm in rural county Derry and the forty years of his working life in Dublin. Heaney lived or wrote in four significant houses in Ireland— Mossbawn in Bellaghy, Ashley Avenue in Belfast, Glanmore Cottage in Wicklow, and Sandymount in Dublin—none of which were available to be transformed into writer’s house museums open to visitors after his death in 2013. These stepping stones from Bellaghy to Belfast and from Wicklow to Dublin are marked by the poet’s deliberate decision to validate his two rural residences, Mossbawn and Glanmore, rather than either of his city homes as dwellings inspiring [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Bellaghy, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland. Photograph by permission of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Exterior of Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again, National Library of Ireland, at the Bank of Ireland Cultural Centre, Dublin, 2018. Photograph by Geraldine Higgins. [End Page 98] his writing. By positioning these symbolic places of writing in the broader context of writers’ museums and literary tourism, this essay examines how various iterations of Seamus Heaney’s desk are used to authenticate the writer’s presence in different locations. Although Simon Goldhill scoffs at the idea that we might learn anything about writers by viewing their furniture, the writer’s desk suggests otherwise. It is a magical object, a symbol of the creative marriage between writers and their work, touched in sickness and health, in frustration and inspiration. The material surface of the desk brings together the elements of writing—the page, the pen, and the living hand—components that have remained unchanged in staging the scene of writing for centuries despite technological advances. Focusing on the cultural work that the writer’s desk must do, I discuss the display of Heaney’s desk at three different exhibitions: the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, County Derry; Seamus H","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"91 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":"135532237","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":"Victoria Kennefick","authors":"Victoria Kennefick, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910473","url":null,"abstract":"Victoria Kennefick Victoria Kennefick and Kelly Sullivan victoria kennefick’s debut collection Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, 2021) won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. A University College Dublin/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023, Victoria is a poetry editor for the online journal bath magg. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke with Victoria Kennefick via Zoom on 24 February 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: Do you remember when you first encountered Seamus Heaney’s poetry? Was it in a school course or was it on your own? victoria kennefick: I remember the moment clearly and so viscer-ally. I went to a very small national school in Shanagarry, Co. Cork, with three grades in the same room together. It was a very intense and crazy environment. We did a lot of Irish and maths, so whenever we moved into English I was thrilled, especially if we read poetry. And we did quite a lot of poetry. I distinctly remember the day that we read “Mid-Term Break.” I must have been ten or eleven and can still remember where the poem was on the page in the book and the picture that was next to it. When a teacher read it aloud to us, the other classes that were supposed to be working away on other topics stopped what they were doing to listen. I remember being incredibly moved by the extent of the loss in the poem. Later, when I realized that it was Heaney’s own brother, [End Page 218] I understood what a profound effect that must have had on him as a boy. “Mid-Term Break” has always an important poem in Heaney’s oeuvre because it’s the one that most Irish people know after encountering it in primary school. It offers insight into Heaney’s beginnings as a poet because of its focus on a life altering event for a sensitive child. I believe this sudden awareness of mortality in addition to the intensity of living in Northern Ireland must have changed his trajectory about what he was going to do with his life—about how life can shift on a penny. The poem broke my heart and still does each time I read it. sullivan: When you were in school and reading Heaney, were you also writing poetry? Did you think of yourself as a poet then? kennefick: I’m glad you asked the question as if it was a normal thing to feel like a poet—because it didn’t feel normal to me. I didn’t understand who I was, but once I could understand language and certainly once I could hold a pen, I felt as if I were a poet. Writing poetry was the only job I wanted or could do [laughter] although it didn’t seem to be a viable one. And yet there were all these poets. I felt I was in this lost liminal space. Both my mother’s and father’s families learned poems by rote as children and were always spouting bits of Shakespeare and long poems like","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"56 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":"135532241","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":"Stephen Sexton","authors":"Stephen Sexton, Kelly Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910468","url":null,"abstract":"Stephen Sexton Stephen Sexton and Kelly Sullivan stephen sexton’s first book If All the World and Love Were Young received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Sexton was also awarded the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020; he won the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Both collections will be published by Wake Forest University Press in 2023. ________ Kelly Sullivan interviewed Stephen Sexton over Zoom on 13 February 2023. This is an edited and shortened version of that conversation. kelly sullivan: I know you grew up in the north of Ireland. I’m wondering if you remember when you first encountered Seamus Heaney’s poetry? stephen sexton: It would have been as a teenager, and I’m guessing I was probably fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I know that we were looking at chiefly early works, the Death of a Naturalist poems. sullivan: Were you already interested in poetry at that point? Or was that a later development for you? sexton: I think I was. English classes were the ones I liked most, but I don’t know if I was interested in poetry, as such. When I was much younger—it was probably busy-work in class as a little kid—we were told to write a poem. And I distinctly remember the feeling of doing that: the feeling of talking myself to the end of the line, having to find a rhyme, and loving the search through my vocabulary for that rhyme. But by the time I got to Heaney in my teens, it’s probably fair to say I was more interested in poetry as something I wrote—as [End Page 171] the experience of making, rather than earnestly thinking about other people’s work. So I was aware of his poems, but not properly, not in a mature way. sullivan: Were you also reading Ciaran Carson and other writers at that time? Or was it just whatever was on the course at the moment that you were absorbing? sexton: I‘d say mostly what was on the course. I was reading a lot—pretty much all of the Goosebumps horror novel series by R. L. Stein. But I imagine with poetry I probably wasn’t reading anything that wasn’t on the course. We read fairly standard work in the curriculum—maybe Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin. I was talking to my colleague Leontia Flynn recently about Larkin, who was in Belfast for some time. We talked about this strange feeling that, perhaps embarrassingly, we were more drawn to Larkin than to Heaney. Certainly at that age when I was reading poetry, Larkin was much more thrilling to me. There was something about his tidiness— not exactly foreignness. But something about Heaney’s writing seemed supremely local in a way that was too close for me to see it properly then. I grew up in the countryside, so those poems didn’t feel like objects of artifice, and I couldn’t really see them as poems. I saw them as out the window.","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":"135532531","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":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910476","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"119 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":"135532534","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":"Collecting Heaney’s Poems, Familiar and Unfamiliar","authors":"Bernard O’Donoghue, Rosie Lavan","doi":"10.1353/eir.2023.a910461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2023.a910461","url":null,"abstract":"Collecting Heaney’s Poems, Familiar and Unfamiliar Bernard O’Donoghue (bio) and Rosie Lavan (bio) Seamus heaney’s death on 30 August 2013 ended a career in poetry that spanned more than half a century. As this special issue of Éire-Ireland indicates, readers continue to encounter the vibrant afterlives of Heaney’s career. His reputation and legacy rest primarily on the twelve volumes of poetry he published with Faber and Faber. Since his death, Faber has been nourishing Heaney’s readers with releases such as 100 Poems (2018) and reissues of his landmark collections, including the 2016 edition of Death of a Naturalist and the 2017 edition of Field Work. Central to these efforts over the past decade has been the commissioning of four major new volumes: Heaney’s translations, letters, and poems as well as the first full-length biography by Fintan O’Toole. Marco Sonzogni’s Translations of Seamus Heaney appeared in 2022,1 and Christopher Reid’s Letters of Seamus Heaney was published in 2023. As editors of the forthcoming The Poems of Seamus Heaney, our task is to compile a comprehensive edition—in other words to gather all the poems Heaney published in the original twelve volumes and in any known print publications to which he contributed since the late 1950s. This article explains the editorial principles governing our selection and arrangement of the poems published under Heaney’s authority as well as those published posthumously—now offered between the covers of one inclusive book. We highlight examples of works we find especially compelling that illustrate the diversity of [End Page 77] Heaney’s uncollected poems and the significance of placing them in sequence alongside those he chose to collect in the twelve volumes. We also consider how Heaney’s national and international profiles governed the reception and afterlives of certain key poems and how his decisions to revise (or not to revise) can be traced through the textual histories of his work. In this respect, our editorial task has been immeasurably enriched by the archival resources that Heaney made available for readers, particularly the extensive collection of papers he delivered himself to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in 2011. That archive, along with the significant collection held at Emory University and holdings in libraries and special collections in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, are indispensable resources for constructing the narrative of Heaney’s life in print. Since the availability of these remarkable collections to researchers provides glimpses of the range of Heaney’s unpublished poetry, our forthcoming edition will include a number of previously unpublished poems. Such newly available works present unique questions for us as editors, but they are—we trust—unquestionable gifts to his readers. Principles of Inclusion At a memorial event for Seamus Heaney at Cambridge University in 2014, Roy Foster asserted that Heaney, like W. B. Yeats, wrote “book","PeriodicalId":43507,"journal":{"name":"EIRE-IRELAND","volume":"20 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":"135532235","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}