VB: What's new about Electric Light?

SH: I think the big, loose weave of the thing. I said to somebody that it's a ruminant book in the sense of chewing the cud. It is stuff that's in the system, in the memory, that is being revisited.

VB: What were you revisiting?

SH: Well, I think, origin. The poem in the book that to me is new and different is Out of The Bag which goes back almost to the origins of consciousness; my own child imagining where I [believed I] came in the doctor's bag. I do remember this clip-top bag, which was always there when the doctor came.

He went up to the room, then when he came down a child would be there. In those days that was a sufficient explanation [that children emerged from the doctor's bag]. I had this vision of the doctor's surgery being full of wee baby bits. I made a connection between it and the old butchers' shops which were tiled white. They had all kinds of hook and gleams and the nakedness of slaughter, and bits and pieces of flesh and bone were there all the time in those old butchers' shops.

I had some connection between the mixture of hygiene and flesh in the butcher's shop and the spare parts in the doctor's surgery.

That original image goes back to the very beginning and links with some concern for healing, for health, for wholeness, for hope against disease that was in my adult life at the time and the chance of going to the Temple of Asclepius (in Homer's Iliad, Asclepius is the god of healing).

I was trying to bring together all the haphazard elements into some kind of shape. I can't quite put my tongue around what is new in the book because I think it's in the poems themselves, that they are slightly odd to me, and I like that.

I suppose there's more subjectivity in the book. It's readier to go down into the bedding in the mind, you know, instead of building it into a shape. Like working in a byre or a stable or, you know, the straw that you lay down on in the bottom of an outhouse, that's tossed about and walked over and belongs in the place. But then you put a fork into it and there's a lot of dust and fragrance and shit (laughs).

The title poem Electric Light, if I may just use that as an example, goes back to a very early sensation - unforgettable, magical. Simply going to my grandmother's house and being allowed to stand up on a chair and turn on the electric light.

We hadn't an electric light in our own house. The radiance of electric light, it was stronger than lamp light, first of all there was that. Secondly, there was the magic of the switch. So there, in the beginning, was that initial radiant transformative thing.

Years ago I might have just written about that and left it there. But now there's something else, the outer rim of the consciousness, the part of me that is contemplating what happened to me since the age of six until the age of 60.

The poem is also concerned with how the discovery and grace and quest of writing poems affected my life. In that poem (Electric Light) I use a word "ails" that my grandmother used, which I had never heard before. It's a strange word, I was afraid one night to be left at my granny's house and she said: "What ails you, child?" meaning to console me.

She scared me more with the word "ails". I didn't know what she meant. But now I think of "ails" as a path into English language, into the otherness of English and into English literature, and so the poem links up with, first of all, going to England and then going to Chaucer's Southwark, where the Canterbury Tales began. In Southwark also there is the site of the Globe Theatre.

VB: What has the quest of writing poetry done to your life?

SH: I think it has allowed the first part of me not to be lost, and I hope to keep some kind of pace, keep some kind of co-ordination with the second, third, fourth, for the developing part of me because I think that any consciousness, if it's going to keep itself integrated, has to keep moving out and at the same time mustn't utterly lose its first point.

My image for it has been the image of ripples in a pool. I can't think of anything better than that. If you drop something into a round pool in the middle, throw in a stone, the little ripples coming out and out and out and then they get out to the very circumference and you watch it a while and you're not sure whether they're rippling out or maybe they're rippling in.

So, to go back again, I think one thing about poetry is that it tries to keep the most intimate [part of you] and most inquisitive intellectually imaginative part of yourself together in some kind of balance. To try and be a whole person and at the same time acknowledge all your different bits.

VB: Going back to this book - what else is new in it?

SH: Well, I think there's less tension. It's more meditative, it's more recollection of things, it's more a relish of things, you know.

When I use the word "tension", I think particularly of the 1970s when there was both inner and outer pressure in Ireland and in me, you know. I think that post1994, post the cessation of violence, the cessations, something changed in me, something changed in everybody. Things were restored to a more equable condition. Actually, I realised how deprived we had been really for 25 years.

There was more anger in my last book, The Spirit Level, than there is in this one. This is a post-agreement book. Of course, I hate that kind of glib linking of the social and psychic, but there may be something in it in this case.

But certainly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the inner being of anybody conscious and answerable on the island was cornered in a different way than now. The spirit is in a different posture, and now it's opener, it's less battened down, less huddled.

VB: Do you like Ireland now?

SH: I feel out of it but I would have a different answer for this question if I didn't have children. I think that the generation in their 20s and 30s are terrific really and they are relishing a life and opportunities that are enhancing for everybody. But I fear that something may be lacking.

I like the old notion of self-denial and patriotism. I can see its abuses, of course, of course, of course, but I like the idea that you are answerable for the whole country and I like the generation that felt that.

You look at the world and you look at Kosovo, at Africa, at South America, at Russia and you realise that care for the other is a kind of global fundamental obligation almost of our kind, you know. That used to be doctrinally taught in schools as part of the kind of penitential faith that I grew up in. There was a system, a theological, doctrinal system applied to the widest reach of your understanding. It applied to the most intimate crevices of yourself in the examination of conscience.

VB: I don't see that reflected in your poetry, that sense of caring for other, for the broader world?

SH: It's not. The broader world as a content and as a geography is not in my poetry, no. It's a little bit in a poem called Known World in this book which is about being in Kosovo. But I don't think that's necessarily the way poetry works. It's more a pitch and a tuning, poetry. I think there's something answerable in the poetry, I think there is a sense of being answerable to and for what's going on.

VB: There are a number of sonnets. Their structure seems to appeal to you even though in some of your comments about poetry, you almost rebel against the idea of structure?

SH: Well, if you do seven or eight or 12 sonnets, if you do a sonnet sequence, you can jump around nicely. It's quite true, I am attracted to the sonnet. If you get into the habit of them, you could write a sonnet every day and I'm never quite sure whether you should keep going or stop. On the whole, I tend to curtail it.

But those [sonnets] are records of an important new experience, which was going to Greece. The first one about going into Arcadia records exactly what happened and I know the date was, wait 'til we see, I think it was October 4th, 1995, because we were going from Argos to Sparta, actual places on the map and also totally legendary.

I couldn't believe it. We crossed the border from Argos and we went into Arcadia and there was even a sign saying "Arcadia". We entered there and what is described there [in the poem Into Arcadia] is actually what happened. There were apples on the road and the car drove over the apples and there was just a sense of toomuchness, abundance. Then we went to Sparta that day, spent the next day, morning in Sparta.

It was Wednesday we drove over the apples, Thursday we were in Sparta. Thursday we drove on to Pilos. Friday I rang home here and the whole Swedish academy business had started. So on the day previous, the ominous richness had occurred. That's the underlife of a couple of those [sonnets].

By temperament, I'm caught between responding to the positive and being wary of the expression of the positive. The uplifting line is suspect to some extent. But there are moments when you have to let the abundance and let the shine come up.

VB: The phone calls back here told you about the Nobel Prize. Was that a moment of exhilaration for you?

SH: I was very shocked, to tell you the truth. I mean, I can't describe it. The effect it had on me, I sat and phoned people for about 2-1/2 hours. People I knew everywhere. Friends.

VB: Why?

SH: I don't know, I just needed to.

VB: Share it with them?

SH: No. I don't know, I don't think I was needing to share it with them. I think it was to ask for forgiveness (laughs). Now, they can share it or not if they want (laughs). I needed steadiness, needed to get in between the banisters. Phoning them was simply the form it took. I was in shock really. Wasn't none of my business, wasn't my decision.

VB: Do you regret anything that you wrote in any of your poems, anything, for instance, you wrote about the North?

SH: No. Different things you do at different times, I would wince artistically at some things, but that's a different matter.

VB: You know the line: "My passport's green/No glass of ours was ever raised/to toast the queen"; any second thoughts about that now? SH: That's fine. I always remember Michael Farrell [now a Dublin solicitor, formerly a leader of the People's Democracy in Northern Ireland], the distinguished valuable Farrell, back in the days when students were self-improving creatures. I discovered myself in the back stalls of the Opera House, I think it was at an Offenbach opera or something, at a matinee in Belfast years ago. Those were the days when they used to play God Save The Queen before things, you know.

So once again you're caught between the courtesies of upwardly mobile middleclass culture and the drag into the nationalist solidarities. So there was this kind of stooping policy that was adopted [he barely rises from his chair, hooting with laughter]. I think Farrell was stooping in front of me.

At any rate, he turned around and he said: "I see you're a nationalist, too." It had to do with that whole complicated, self-mocking position, standing and not standing. It's still not quite resolved.

VB: What would you do now if you were in a similar position?

SH: I'd stand for anybody's anthem, but the idea that you were being compelled to stand was the enraging thing. It was triumphalist. The anthem was an instrument of coercion. But that's changed [with the Good Friday agreement].

VB: In an introduction you did to a small book of poems by Wordsworth you went about him becoming more an institution, that as a poet he had lost his way. You have become quite an institution yourself.

SH: Wordsworth was visited every day by international figures and so on. It was a different world maybe.

VB: Did he have American presidents quote lines from his poems?

SH: More importantly, British prime ministers did (laughs).

VB: Do you ever think: "Oh my God, I've been institutionalised, fossilised"? SH: Certainly not.

VB: Are you flattered by the recognition and the awards? SH: I have a standoff with it and questions about it.

VB: Deep down are you flattered by it?

SH: Flattered is not the word. Flattery suggests insincere and self-seeking approach. I think this thing has crept up.

VB: You've been Famous Seamus for a long time.

SH: I know that, so I've had an ironical distance from all that. If I may say so, I have been dealing with it for a long time. The beginning of celebration is the beginning of execration.

VB: You haven't had much of execration.

SH: Not directly. But the voltage is there nevertheless.

VB: That word "voltage" occurs a lot in your vocabulary.

SH: I believe that under-energy is the real thing. I don't believe half of the things people say. I believe in the flow of rage and trust that goes on underneath. That's related to the belief in voltage, or whatever.

VB: What of your work are you most pleased about? SH: The fact that it's kept going, I suppose, but I don't know how to answer that. What I would say to myself is that I did a decent job in my working life, my job life as a teacher. I worked hard and did honourable work there. I was completely blessed by the extra part of my life, which I associate with poetry, I was extremely lucky, as you know.

VB: Do you write poetry every day?

SH: No. I write poetry irregularly.

VB: Did you write poetry today?

SH: No. Well, actually, I did (laughs). It used to be I was up and out to work and marking essays and, you know, carrying kids around. I've more time and I've a more devoted sense of doing work now. I do attend to it more regularly, more habitually, but I don't believe that industry actually produces excellence in the realm of lyric poetry all the time.

I'm kind of caught between two notions. One is you should be at it, and the other is, look at what people who are at it produce.

VB: Do you revise much?

SH: Sometimes. I do revise more, but what I have to say is what any bloody writer says, so it's so cliched and so obviously repetitive but I'll say it anyway. Some things you do very quickly and you never change them, and those things you cherish and they prove to yourself that as a poet you're a part of the mythic shape of things.

In other words the muse has sung and, idiotically for a minute, you feel ah, the merriment, joy, almost sexual delight of it. Bang. Then the post-coital (laughs).

Nevertheless, without those moments - call it visitation, inspiration, accident, whatever - without that it would be very difficult to proceed. All kinds of people describe it all kinds of different ways, but those conferrals from the unconscious or wherever, those releases, are crucial, I think. But equally crucial for the conduct of a vocation is the application and the part that is self-critical.

You have to be able to dwell as a creature of culture as well as a creature of impulse. Oh, shut up! [He doesn't and there is much more blather full of metaphors.]

Enough metaphors! Stop.

VB: Thanks very much, Seamus. SH: Enough, enough.

"One thing about poetry is that it tries to keep the most intimate [part of you] and most inquisitive, intellectually imaginative, part of yourself together in some kind of balance. To try and be a whole person and at the same time acknowledge all your different bits"