THREE days before what would have been Seamus Heaney’s 75th birthday, Graham Fawcett reflects on Heaney’s achievement over nearly fifty years at Sladers Yard in West Bay tomorrow at 6.30pm.
His poetic début in 1966 was Death of A Naturalist, poems about his early life in rural Northern Ireland in which he tells with craft and clarity about the world around him.
Nobel Prize laureate in 1995, and translator of Beowulf, two plays by Sophocles and poetry from Irish, Middle Scots, Latin, Polish and the Italian of Dante, Heaney wrote more than 20 books of poetry and criticism.
After Heaney’s death, in 2013, the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, said: ‘He came to be the poet we all measured ourselves against and he demonstrated the true vocational nature of his art for every moment of his life.”
She added: “He is irreplaceable.”
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