Heaney honours Yeats's criterion

HAD IT been Russia, where there is a long tradition of poets filling football stadiums, there would have been no novelty. But a capacity crowd for a poetry reading in Ireland is still no mean achievement.

Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, stood last night in dishevelled splendour on the stage of the Abbey - Yeats's `Poet's Theatre' - and read from his new collection, The Spirit Level, to a lively gathering of a size more usually associated with concerts or plays.

While the event officially launched The Spirit Level, it was also Heaney's first public reading as Nobel Laureate. When introducing him Patrick Mason the Abbey's artistic director, said the voice of the poet is as vital to theatre as that of the playwright.

He quoted one of the many artistic injunctions by Yeats, Ireland's first literature laureate that writers at the Abbey should `speak the deeper thoughts of Ireland'. Heaney has and does.

Childhood memories; the merging of the elegiac past with a bloodier, more recent one as in Keeping Going and Two Lorries; it was his familiar voice - reasonable, conversational, honest and all seeing with humorous asides: "What is the lookout of history? More of it."

The new collection has a variety of mood and tone shifts; wise, alert to wonder, responsive, angry. From the beauty of a blind neighbour exclaiming of a poem describing a well, "I can see the sky at the bottom of it now", to the fear and fury of virtuoso works such as Mycenae Lookout and The Flight Path.

Earlier Matthew Evans, chairman of London publishers Faber & Faber, paid tribute to the late Charles Monteith, Heaney's editor, who died shortly before the Nobel announcement.

Heaney read a new poem dedicated to the 1987 Nobel Laureate, Joseph Brodsky, "a flame thrower for poetry" who died suddenly at 55 on January 28th, "the death day of Yeats". After a standing ovation, he patiently faced queues of readers intent on having their copies of The Spirit Level signed.