“... but it was a meaningful comparison in a way it would not be between, say, Danielle Steele and Seamus Heaney. The scale of bestsellerdom increased sharply after the end of the First World war. The Sheikh, by the hitherto little-known Mrs E.M. Hull, appeared in 1919 and soon sold more than a million copies (the film version gave Valentino one of his ...”

“... the most remote in provenance from Billy’s may in a sense be the most germane to it. Seamus Heaney once attributed his earliest understanding of words as ‘bearers of history and mystery’ to the ‘beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC shipping forecast – Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre’. These rhythms have ...”

“... established figures.Very much so. I’d read them at school.What about people who came later on: Seamus Heaney, say?I reviewed Seamus Heaney’s first book somewhat unfavourably in the Observer. Not unfavourably, I could see he was quite good but he wasn’t that special and I said so. There’s a mocking piece ...”

“... indeed, this anthology has for some years past been heralded as the major Field Day intervention. Seamus Deane explains the imagined significance of the anthology: ‘It is important to do this now because the political crisis in Ireland, precipitated in 1968, but in gestation for many years before that date, has exposed the absence within the island of any ...”

“... can fecundate, whereas imitation – especially unconscious imitation – can only sterilise.’ Seamus Heaney has recorded the importance of Ted Hughes to him as an example: ‘suddenly, the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life.’ Athol Fugard has acknowledged a similar debt to Camus. After apprentice work which struggled to ...”

“... to a writer in his own text, the reader is put on special alert. Think of the charged encounter in Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Flight Path’. The grimfaced stranger on the train, ‘last met in a dream’, hurls ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write Something for us?’ at the poet. Heaney responds: ‘If ...”

“... sort of historico-spiritualist hocus-pocus Yeats was so fond of. For them Yeats becomes the figure Seamus Heaney invokes in a moment of devil’s advocacy, representing ‘the reliable citizen’: ‘this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolemaic astrology’. I don’t disagree about the swagger and ...”

“... 77 names, which you should list if you pass one to ward off ill luck (few are complimentary). Seamus Heaney’s translation has, among others:The creep-along, the sitter-still,the pintail, the ring-the-hill,the sudden start, the shake-the-heart,​​​​the belly-white, the lambs-in-flight.The gobshite, the gum-sucker,the scare-the-man, the ...”

“... by Seamus Heaney), as well as ‘ragged’, ‘shabby’, ‘sour’, ‘stroked harls’ and the reference to the ‘muck that clouts a ploughman’s shoe’, are also markers of this significant aesthetic category. When Clare says in an untitled poem ...”

“... Poetry Books’ in October, had William Blake: The Collected Poems at number six (in company with Seamus Heaney, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage and Margaret Atwood). The book was puffed as ‘the background to Peter Ackroyd’s best-selling biography’. The hike to Felpham, a dormitory of the living dead, was unremarkable. I understood why the journey took ...”

“... Ellison took a dim view of Baldwin’s involvement), just as writers like Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney avoided active involvement in the public life of Northern Ireland after 1972. (‘Forgive my timid, circumspect involvement,’ Heaney was later to write.) But Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately ...”

“... 1970s Moore made contact with other Gaels interested in the meaning of life, among them the poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon and the playwright Brian Friel. He had met Friel for the first time in Ireland in 1969 and the two began to correspond. They had much in common, both having attempted works in which young men deal with their fathers. Both were ...”

“... sends the wrong message to, as it were, a pre-intimidated readership, but it does catch what Seamus Heaney, a friend of his last years, called ‘the fish-dart of your eyes’. What I like about the edition is presumably what more austere critics will take against: its frayed edges, its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the ...”

“... poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But in this too, oddly enough, one can fail to find Larkin: because the desire to make tribute tends to move the stress towards the more public, more social aspects of the work, giving little sense of the human ...”

“... which English poetry last had in the Thirties. The way in which poets as diverse as Heaney, Muldoon, Longley, McGuckian, Carson and Mahon are to a certain degree sustained by a single symbolic world is something that poets like Armitage and Maxwell are trying to copy. In Maurice Riordan’s first collection, A Word From the Loki, the title poem ...”