German audience warms to Heaney

THE official opening may not be until this afternoon. But for the audience of 600 in the Hessischer Rundfunk Concert Hall, this year's Frankfurt Book Fair began the moment Seamus Heaney started his long awaited reading.

For many Germans, the Nobel prizewinner embodies much that they admire not just about Irish writing but about Ireland itself. The reading was sold out weeks in advance and the applause was warm and plentiful, but it was a curiously low key evening.

Mr Heaney, his voice a little hoarse, started at the beginning of his career with three poems about his rural youth, but covered almost the whole range of his oeuvre in his selection of less than 20 poems. His introductions were often almost as rich as the poems themselves. Mossbawn, he said, was "a Dutch interior painting masquerading as a poem".

He talked humorously of how a misprint in an early poem bogeyed for big eyed - had been curiously appropriate in the context of his abiding fascination with the preservative powers of peat.

Mr Heaney concluded with a series of poems from his most recent collections focusing on "the attraction of the marvellous, indeed the necessity of the marvellous".

Marvellous as much of the reading was, the poet himself appeared oddly hesitant, but there was still enough of his magnetic charm to send the audience home well satisfied.

Away from the Irish pavilion, tonight's most coveted invitation is to a lavish dinner at the Frankfurter Hof Hotel hosted by the New York literary agent, Mr Andrew Wylie. Mr Wylie has invited almost 100 of the world's top publishers to bid for a book which has not yet been written. The author is an unknown American computer scientist the book is about the Internet.