Seamus Heaney

I feel bereft at the loss of Seamus Heaney.
I saw him, spoke with him at a summer school in Ireland, two weeks before he died. He was frail, but otherwise his usual warm, big-hearted self. That evening, he gave a reading with his fellow poet and long-time friend, Michael Longley. Two mighty oaks. One now fallen. The hall was packed. Filled with our pride and love. We gave them a standing ovation. The air was full with our love and admiration.  We didn’t know it was a valediction.
The Irish Times put it best. “We will always have the great poet. We have lost an exemplary man.”
I owe him a restored love of poetry. My love of poetry had been deadened by studying T S Eliot at school – all those arcane references to The Golden Bough. When I read the poems in Seamus’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, I fell in love with poetry again. I could even approach, re-read and appreciate Eliot.
For those of us who grew up in, lived in Northern Ireland during the worst of the Troubles, Seamus was a compass in a time of moral confusion. We miss him terribly.
Seamus Heaney (13th April 1939 – 30th August 2012) Requiescat In Pace.