Guidebook, handbook, tribute album – 50 poets muse on Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was our best poet, by a country mile.

Since his death on August 30th last year, nothing about Irish poetry is, or can be, the same. When I was invited to take up the editorship at Poetry Ireland Review, I knew the first thing I would want to do was an issue dedicated to him. Being the person he was, many poets and friends and colleagues had already paid warm tribute to his gifts as a poet and as a man. Instead, I wanted to focus on the work, on the rich haul of extraordinary poems he has left in his wake.

Reading his work is a way of seeing what poetry is capable of; what a well-made poem, in its wildest dreams, can manage to achieve. We all learn from him. So I invited 50 (mostly) younger poets from Ireland, the UK and the US to write a short essay on a single poem that mattered to them. “Younger” because I thought it would be a working gauge of the depth and breadth of his poetic heritage. The countries I chose because Seamus had a presence, professionally and personally, in each.

What I hoped for was a close reading, a careful and insightful probe at how each poem worked – something akin to looking inside a longcase clock from the eighteenth century to examine the mechanism. I knew it wouldn’t explain the thing, that a poem doesn’t work mechanically, (and that this might be exactly why we love a poem, when we do), but I thought it would be interesting to open up the back of the thing and have a wee peek anyway.

Typically, the response I got was that nothing would give the poet more pleasure than to sit with a Seamus Heaney poem and try to work out just how it was that he pulled off the magic tricks of his most magical, much-loved poems.

I left the choice of Heaney poem entirely up to each poet. I thought it wouldn’t matter if there were crossovers; that this would be, in fact, an enjoyable bonus for the reader, to see the one poem approached from different sightlines, different footholds, as it were. In fact, there are precious few crossovers. It seems a simple thing to say that his achievement is so profound and his influence so ample that so many poets love so many different poems, but it is not. Is there, I wonder, another poet for whom the same claim could be made?

Guidebook, handbook, tribute album: the essays in this issue are even more than I hoped for. Each is accompanied by its original poem, so that it’s possible to see immediately and exactly how the close reading by each contributor applies. Among the 50 contributors are Simon Armitage, Christian Wiman, Caitríona O’Reilly, Alan Gillis, Michael Hofmann, Jane Yeh, Nick Laird, Monica Youn, Leontia Flynn, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jamie McKendrick, Sean O’Brien, Daisy Fried, Carl Phillips and Francis Leviston.

The issue is illustrated by an insert of 16 pages of photographs and other images, most taken from Emory University's landmark exhibition, Seamus Heaney: The Music of What Happens, curated by Prof Geraldine Higgins, Emory's Director of Irish Studies. The cover images, kindly provided by Marie Heaney, feature previously unseen late photographs of Seamus.

I’m very grateful to each poet for taking on the task with such grace and enthusiasm. Wise, generous and alert, these 50 essays prove, I hope, a fitting honouring of a poet who mattered so profoundly to us writers and readers, for whom his work so marvellously endures.

Poetry Ireland Review Issue 113: a Seamus Heaney Special Issue is out now.