Seamus Heaney - In Memoriam

The photo here comes from this past end-of-April, when Seamus Heaney, his wife, Marie, and I coincided at the American Academy’s guesthouse in Rome. Seamus was there to read poems and talk about Ovid, later in May—one more instance in a lifetime's service to those he felt were progenitor-compatriots in the art. The memory is so recent, and he was so well, fully himself. The Ovid presentation, I later heard, was, true to form, brilliant. We spoke that night about those we’d known and been with together, now gone—Czeslaw and Carol Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Dennis O'Driscoll. Shared with Seamus and Marie, bereftness felt larger, softened of edge. Seamus carried with him, always it felt, a warming current, selfless and steady as a Gulf Stream. A benevolence-sense that existence itself was a grant of basic goodness, though without any blindness to what, beyond and outside goodness, might also be true.

Hundreds of friends, family, colleagues and humble admirers visited south Belfast this week to pay their respects to the late author and poet Seamus Heaney.

Seamus Heaney was the lyrical Virgilian guide for a bewildered Irish generation.

Stephen Thorne writes: On the way for a curry in Soho, Seamus Heaney found a shoe. During the meal he inscribed a poem on it

Observer editorial: Heaney reconciled in himself two traditions often seen as being in irreconcilable conflict

Playwright Daragh Carville pays tribute to the late Seamus Heaney, and shares his memories of an inspirational man. The words 'Seamus Heaney' and 'Death' have been linked ever since the very beginn...

Impossible.

And yet, of course, not impossible: of course, too possible, too much the reality of what we would always have to face one day, one morning waking across time zones, stumbling upon radio tributes, answering the phone to the have you heard, to the gut-punch, to the heart-bolt: he is gone.

Our laureate.

Colm Tóibín: In a time of burnings and bombings Heaney used poetry to offer an alternative world; he gave example by his seriousness, his honesty, his thoughtfulness, his generosity

Canadian-born author interviewed at Dún Laoghaire festival ahead of publication of final chapter in trilogy

Hundreds sign book of condolences for Heaney in Dublin

Eason’s bookshop on Dublin’s O’Connell Street sold out within days of poet’s passing

POETRY collections by Seamus Heaney have sold out in bookshops across the country following the Nobel Laureate's sudden death last Friday.

Mr. Heaney, a widely celebrated Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, is recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century.

Let's hope that legislators and communicators take note over the next few days of what that tired old phrase "the impact of the arts" really means. Seamus Heaney was the prime

We will always have the great poet. We have lost an exemplary man

Editorial: Seamus Heaney's death has been a national event, a tribute to the poet and to the way literature continues to infuse Irish life

Ireland's late Nobel Prize winner transformed my ideas of what it can mean to be a poet.