His kitchen is a farmer's kitchen. A large wooden dresser, a range, a long kitchen table and wooden chairs, and a wooden clothes line hanging from the ceiling.

He looks like a farmer himself, and his conversation is sprinkled with agricultural metaphors, like his poems. In a room off the kitchen, there is a large painting of a cow against a bare off-white background.

He seems thinner and almost younger than I had remembered him from eight years ago when we last met, but the unruly hair is thinner, too, and greyer.

He had opened the door to me at his Sandymount home in Dublin last Tuesday. He made coffee as we talked about mutual friends, especially one who had died, and about the confessor of that friend, an Australian Jesuit. Seamus diced with the idea of going to confession himself.

There is a friendliness, merriment and warmth about him. He is not so much polite, rather respectful, meticulously so. When the interview begins, he insists as interviewer I sit at the top of the kitchen table. He tightens up, as though he struggles to find his rhythm in the formality of the interview. He eases into it, though, laughing a lot, not at what he is saying but of the predicaments he is describing.

At times he does a running commentary on what he is saying, especially at the end, as though he is bored with himself.

He certainly isn't, of course. He is fascinated not so much by himself but by the discoveries he is making of himself through poetry. That, he says, is what this new collection, Electric Light, is about.

I ask him about the Latin poet Virgil, one of whose poems, Eclogue IX, he translates for this collection. Would he have liked Virgil? A foolish question, for he would hardly have done the translation had he not, but there is more than that.

Virgil also came from a rural background and was steeped in the "infrastructure of agriculture". "He knows about the fields, about rurality." Virgil also knew of evictions from agricultural holdings. His father had been evicted from his farm by Caesar's army, and that disruption, along with the rural agricultural background obviously, is what attracted Heaney so much to him.

He talks of two other giants in literature, both contemporaries and both recently deceased, Ted Hughes and Joseph Brod sky. Hughes has been hugely influential: "I took down a book of his called Lupercal in the Belfast Public Library and I read a poem called View of a Pig, which was about a dead pig being shaved, and this immediately jumped me back into pre-literate life, into a yard at Bellaghy, when the pig killer was there. Anything further away from ["establishment" poetry] I couldn't imagine, for this was my secret memory, as I thought . . .

"Eventually when I met him [I found him] a man of discretion, intuition, high learning, terrific substantial creativity in him. He was one of those people, you come into his presence and you are reawakened".

OF Brodsky he says: "Joseph was vertical take-off . . . Brodsky changed the energy level for poets in the United States".

He tightens up again when I ask why there are no poems about his children, in contrast to the many poems about his parents. He says there have been a few, for instance A Kite for Michael and Christopher and one for Catherine, The Stick.

But "it's risky country . . . I think it is an intrusion. I don't have a philosophy about it. Why didn't I do it? It's just a reticence or maybe my experience with them is too complete a thing? There's no detachment. There's no outside circumference on it. I'm close in to them, breathing in their emotional faces and they in mine. It doesn't require writing about."

When the interview is over, he is more relaxed again. He becomes again the farmer at the kitchen table, and before I go he does a wonderful imitation of the doctor holding his arms out suddenly behind him "to be squired and silk-lined into the camel coat", all thanks denied.

He shows me the painting of the cow on the way out. We speculate on foot-and-mouth.