Seamus Heaney: 10 Essential Poems

An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but Stepping Stones (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in 100 Poems, and in the individual collections. There are many ways to look at Heaney’s work, and the ten poems I choose only present one picture: a poet as at home on the farm as he was at Harvard; as interested in literary history as in archaeology and the deep interior of the Irish imagination; as concerned with childhood, memory, and family as with the darkest aspects of human life. In introducing these poems, I reflect on Heaney’s importance in my own life, and the huge impact his death had on me, ten years ago this month. The poems I read are:   Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist, 1966) The Forge and Bogland (Door into the Dark, 1969) The Tollund Man (Wintering Out, 1972) The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work, 1979) Squarings #2, #8, #40 (Seeing Things, 1991) from his translations of Beowulf (1999) Uncoupled (Human Chain, 2010)   The episode ends with Heaney's reading of "The Tollund Man." Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

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