Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney reads some of his best-known poems in a 1990 performance in front of a Toronto crowd as part of the Harbourfront Reading Series (now called Toronto International Festival of Authors).
In this captivating episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, step back in time to 1990 Toronto and immerse yourself in the lyrical world of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. The recording captures Heaney in an intimate reading at the Harbourfront Reading Series, where his distinctive Irish voice brings to life some of his most beloved poems, including "Digging," "Follower," and "The Railway Children."
Heaney's verse resonates with the earthy cadence of his native countryside, conjuring vivid tableaux of his heritage—his father's calloused hands excavating potatoes from resistant soil, his aunt's practiced movements transforming flour into sustenance, and his boyhood self gazing skyward, convinced that rain-slicked telegraph wires conducted not just electricity but human connection itself. With characteristic warmth and humour, Heaney considers his creative process, discussing how his Irish upbringing and English literary education influenced his distinctive poetic voice. This rare archival recording reveals not just Heaney's masterful command of language, but also his generosity of spirit and deep humanity. Whether you're a longtime admirer of Heaney's work or discovering his poetry for the first time, this episode offers a remarkable opportunity to hear one of the 20th century's greatest poets bringing his words to life in his own voice.
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This audio recording of Seamus Heaney, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1990, is used with the kind permission of Faber & Faber and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors.Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.
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SHOW NOTES
Works by Seamus Heaney
Death of a Naturalist (print edition)
New Selected Poems (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone (print edition) (ebook)
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose (print edition)
Station Island (print edition)
Other works about Heaney and other materials
On Seamus Heaney by R.F. Foster (print edition)
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (print edition)
The Poet & the Piper: Music by Seamus Heaney and Liam O'Flynn (music file via Hoopla)
Seamus Heaney's Poetry of Remembrance (documentary via Kanopy)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Seamus Heaney reads some poems, tells some stories, and teaches us a few lessons about poetry and family and the gift that each can be, for the other.
Seamus Heaney excerpt:
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away
RANDY: Nighttime, early March in Toronto about 25 years ago: that time of the year that’s no longer cold and dark but not yet warm and bright: carrying, like a fritter-edged brick, my copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, I descended into the basement library of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. The student librarian behind the circulation desk saw me and smiled: we knew each other a little, but what really excited her was the chance to show me what she was reading: a book of poetry, by Seamus Heaney.
I was, I confess, terrified, that she was going to ask me what I thought of his poetry: yes, I was an English major, and yes Heaney had recently won the Nobel Prize; and yes, he was probably the best known living poet in the world; and yes, he was certainly well-established, decades after his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), as the most significant Irish poet since William Butler Yeats, and a worthy successor to Yeats and to other great modern Irish writers, like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, whose work I was obviously interested in … and … at the time, I hadn’t read anything by Seamus Heaney.
But, as librarians do, she presumed the best of me, and asked what I thought of his work. I think I said something like “Well, you know, Irish writers are all just so difficult.”
She nodded, politely, and went back to reading Heaney while I went on to read Joyce.
Of course, having reading Seamus Heaney since then, I know why the student librarian had nodded politely at me. Joyce, Beckett, even Yeats: difficult. Heaney? Not difficult at all, and yet, not easy, either. Throughout his career, from the mid-1960s until his death in 2013, Heaney had a presence in global literary life like no other. Ordinary readers adored his work — 2/3 of all poetry sold in the United Kingdom in 2009, the year he turned 70, was by him — and so did scholars and critics and fellow poets.
He wrote about family life, and the rural and farm ways of his early years in Mossbawn, County Derry, where he grew up the oldest of nine children, in the kind of place where people tended to spend their lives the way the way the people before them did, for generations.
And as Heaney conveys in “Digging,” one of his best-known early poems, which you’ll hear in a moment, he had a deep and deeply self-aware respect for the labour of his father and those that had come before him – not just for the difficulty of cutting sod from hard ground, but the seriousness and care such men took in doing this work, the artfulness, even, of it.
As much became both a source and model for Heaney himself: he would not follow his father in cutting sod for a living, but instead, and with confidence and clarity, his spade would be a pen, and his labour would be to reveal — with a sense of melancholic wonder that is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Heaney’s writing — the inherent dignity of his father’s labour and of lives like his and others in the rural and village worlds of Ireland. He did so by engaging with Ireland’s Catholic and Celtic cultural and linguistic legacies, while also engaging with the British literary tradition, whether translating Beowulf into modern verse or, as you’ll also hear shortly, channeling Andrew Marvell to come up with a last-minute baby gift.
***
[applause]
Greg Gatenby: The first poetry reading which I ever attended, which brought tears to my eyes, I won't go so far as to say they actually fell, I have a reputation to maintain...
[laughter]
GG: Took me weeks, for example, to get the black diamond writer studs off this black jacket. Was in 1975 at Hart House, not at Harbourfront, and it was a reading with Al Purdy and the wonderful Australian poet Alec Hope, AD Hope, and an Irish poet whose reputation was just starting to materialize here in Canada, called Seamus Heaney. I may have been teary-eyed because I'd had six pints of Guinness just prior to the reading, they were serving it for some reason just in the lobby, but it was such a beautiful reading it still stays in my mind, and certainly the highlight of the night was our next poet. Please welcome Seamus Heaney.
[applause]
01:47 Seamus Heaney: I must say I regret that Greg has ruined his memory by inviting me to do it again.
[laughter]
01:58 SH: I'm delighted however to be at the Harbourfront, which is a setting that I've heard of from other poets, and I've heard from the Harbourfront a couple or three times over the last few years, always wanted to come, and it's a pleasure to be here. I have read in Toronto before, and I've happy memories not only of the reading that Greg mentioned, but events in York University and in fact, a magazine here called Exile was very hospitable to my work, about 10 years ago. I thought I would read golden oldies to begin with.
[chuckle]
02:36 SH: I'm delighted to be reading with someone who has a first book out, I think it's a wonderful moment in any writer's life, when the first book comes out. Unalloyed pleasure for a little while in your life.
[laughter]
02:57 SH: This is the first poem which it was, in my first book which was called, the book was called Death of a Naturalist, the poem is called "Digging."
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
It was no surprise to me that when I went to the Soviet Union for my first visit, and only read one poem at this big reading, that that was the one they chose.
[laughter]
05:13 SH: And I commended them for that. Writing should be work of some sort, I suppose. This is called "Follower," it's the same kind of poem except that it's in quatrains, and it's... This used to be an obsessive theme. I think the actual sexual politics have changed considerably in the last 30 years or so. I suspect maybe a moment has come, and it's hard to realize that it might come, but maybe a moment has come, when young male poets don't write poems about their father anymore, but there was a hell of a lot of it going on for a long time.
[laughter]
05:58 SH: This is called "Follower."
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away
07:20 SH: This is a poem which is in memory of an aunt of mine who lived in the house where I grew up, and she baked bread every day for years, but I don't remember one day from another. I mean, I must have seen it thousands of times, but it was all like one day in my memory. So this is... I imagine myself in... I mean, this poem started imagining myself in the cradle with this going on. I was very lucky, I had two women in my life from the start, that was my mother and there was this aunt. And the aunt, as well as baking bread, her function was simply to dispense uncomplicated affection, constantly.
[laughter]
08:09 SH: And luckily she had the gift for doing that. So we were enormously lucky, but I was very lucky for I was the first. So there was nobody else to take it, to share it with for the first couple of years. So just imagine the stillness and sunlight and silence, and the little self taking it all in.
[laughter]
08:40 SH: Called "Sunlight."
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
10:00 SH: I grew up in a house of great cleavage between speech and silences in it. All my father's people believed in saying nothing, and all my mother's people thought they could say things. So it ended up that my father was triumphing and I knew he sat triumphing by saying nothing, while my mother triumphed by out-stripping him in volubility constantly. So it was a kind of satisfactory hot war between them, and my mother died and he's left now on the shores of silence utterly, without anybody to triumph over. That will all come up later on. I'm just looking at the list of poems here, that reminded me of it.
10:52 SH: This is a poem called "The Railway Children," it's about... Well, it's related to what I was saying in some ways because it's about dumb understanding and I think that's what poetry in some sense is. When we were youngsters, we thought that telegrams... We lived beside a railway, the railway ran through the farm. We thought that the telegrams were sent along the wires, which they were, but we thought that they traveled in the raindrops which ran along the wires when it rained. So I was kinda dumb.
[laughter]
11:28 SH: But wise. So this is a poem about that. I was saying to someone today that I've been teaching so long that after a certain point in a poetry reading I stop reading my poems and start giving a lesson on poetry. So, you won't mind if I teach this poem? This is about...
[laughter]
11:53 SH: This is about the word and the world been the same thing, and, I mean, that's ideal situation for a writer. And the child's looking up, and on the raindrop that's traveling along the wire, of course, if it were properly magnified, the whole world from horizon to horizon is inside the raindrop, and in fact we were inside it looking up at ourselves. That's the whole poem, but these are the words that are in the book.
[laughter]
12:34 SH: "The Railway Children":
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
This the same kind of poem, just different subject. In 1972, courtesy of another Canadian indeed, we moved to County Wicklow from Belfast, where we were living my wife, myself, and two young boys. The jubilation of the thought of leaving Belfast caused us to find a girl in Wicklow between ourselves, or perhaps I should say, found a girl rather than find a girl. Anyway, we ended up in this cottage belonging to Ann Saddlemeyer who was, very generously offered it to us, and among other pleasures there was the pleasure of living near water for the first time.
14:08 SH: I was kind of born landlocked and this was near the sea, and I began to realize that the old BBC Weather Forecast, which I always loved to hear, BBC's stentorian voice saying, the names of the regions of the sea, very beautiful places like German Bight, Dogger, Cromarty, Faroes, Biscay, Malin, you know all those. That this actually was meant for ships because after a stormy night, after a gale warning kind of night, there would be ships, especially French trawlers in the Bay at Wicklow. So this poem's just about that, and it plays with some of the old words for the sea that were used in Anglo-Saxon poetry, when they call it the Whale's Road and the Seal's Road, and so on.
Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.
16:08 SH: I think I'll just do a couple more because it's a... You've been listening for a good while now, give you a break. I'll do one Irish one and one English one. My experiences all happened in Ireland but most of my literary education occurred through the poetry of England, and English poetry. And this is in a small, literary, venial way, an emblem of part of the trouble of a larger, mortal sort that goes on in our country. But I'll do two things: One is a translation from the Irish of a poem in praise of trees, spoken by the Mad King Sweeney, who was cursed and turned into a flying creature and lived in the trees and consequently became very familiar with them. He spoke the poem in Irish and he spoke it in the vocative case in the original, that is to say in the first section where the oak tree is involved he said, "A dhar, a dharaíocht," which literally translated says, "Oh oak, oh, oakyness."
[laughter]
17:15 SH: And this has its charms undoubtedly, it really has, but it has been done that way by Flann O'Brien and I thought, "It can't be triumphed over, I'll have to change my tack entirely." So instead of going into the vocative case, I went into the third person. Anyway, this is Sweeney's praise of all the trees of Ireland. Well, not all of them, some of them, and some vegetation also.
17:43 SH:
["Sweeney Astray"]
"The bushy leafy oak tree
is highest in the wood,
the forking shoots of hazel
hide sweet hazel-nuts.
The alder is my darling,
all thornless in the gap,
some milk of human kindness
coursing in its sap.
The blackthorn is a jaggy creel
stippled with dark sloes;
green watercress is thatch on wells
where the drinking blackbird goes.
Sweetest of the leafy stalks,
the vetches strew the pathway;
The oyster grass is my delight
and the wild strawberry.
Low-set clumps of apple trees
drum down fruit when shaken;
scarlet berries clot like blood
on the mountain rowan.
Briars curl in sideways,
arch a stickle back,
draw blood and curl up innocent
to sneak the next attack.
The yew tree in each churchyard
wraps night in its dark hood.
Ivy is a shadowy
genius of the wood.
Holly rears its windbreak,
a door in winter's face;
life-blood on a spear-shaft
darkens the grain of ash.
Birch tree, smooth and lovely,
delicious to the breeze,
high twigs plait and crown it
the queen of trees.
The aspen pales
and whispers, hesitates:
A thousand frightened scuts
race in its leaves.
But what disturbs me most
in a leafy wood
is a to and fro and to and fro
of an oak rod," says Sweeney.
19:20 S1: He was always afraid when he saw a branch moving, for that was a sign that somebody else had been there, and he hated humankind. This other poem is... It was an occasional poem, it's not in any of the books. It was written as a present for a little girl. In fact written about the time when our little girl was getting ready to appear. I was in England, in Gloucestershire, most benign landscape, and disturbing to an Irish person to meet such calm.
[laughter]
20:00 SH: And I was with my wife, sister, and her husband, and they had had a little girl, a new baby called Daisy, and this little Daisy was half-English, half-Irish, her father was very English, her mother was very Irish, and she had been christened two days before we arrived and we suddenly realized we had nothing with us for the kid. So Marie said to me, "Go upstairs and write something."
[laughter]
20:35 SH: Maurice Whitton will know that that is a strict command. So there it was, nothing for it but get up and do it. The place where they lived was a delightful house called Bradley Court, a rather grand house in its own way. So I wrote it in a very English way, I wrote it in the meter of Andrew Marvell's poem "The Garden," which is a poem in praise of civility and calm and withdrawal and all that, that is beyond a lot of us.
[chuckle]
21:13 SH: Anyway, it's called "A Peacock's Feather," because we found a peacock's feather on the lawn, and that was my present to the youngster, but I wrapped it up in this poem. "A Peacock's Feather for Daisy Garnett."
21:29 SH:
Six days ago the water fell
To name and bless your fontanel
Which seasons towards womanhood,
But now your life is sleep and food
Which, with a touch of love, suffice
You Daisy, Daisy, English niece.
Gloucestershire, its prospects lie
Wooded and misty to my eye
Whose landscape, like your mother's was,
Is other than this mellowness
Of topiary, lawn and brick,
Possessed, untrespassed, walled, nostalgic…
I come from scraggy farm and moss,
Old patchworks that the pitch and toss
Of history have left dishevelled.
But here, for your sake,
I have levelled my cart-track
Voice to garden tones, cobbled the bog
With Cotswolds stones.
Ravelling strands of families mesh
In love knots of two minds, one flesh.
The future is not our own.
We nod and wave in trust, but little intimacy.
…So this is a billet-doux to say
That in a warm July, you lay
Christened and smiling in Bradley.
While I, a guest in your green court,
At a west window sat and wrote
Self-consciously in gathering dark,
I might as well be in Coole Park!
So before I leave your ordered home
Let us pray: May tilth and loam
Darkened with Celts' and Saxons' blood
Breastfeed your love of house and wood,
Where I drop this for you as I pass,
Like the peacock's feather on the grass.
Thank you.
[applause]
***
RANDY: Seamus Heaney was born on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939. The oldest of nine children, he attended Catholic boarding school on scholarship, then Queen’s University in Belfast, where he lived until the early 1970s, during which time he began publishing poetry and literary criticism. This continued while he taught at an education college in Dublin; as his reputation developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he took up appointments at Harvard University and Oxford University, among other institutions around the world. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, and thereafter continued to write poetry, prose, and translate the work of others, including Dante and several Polish writers, while becoming probably the best known poet in the world. He married Marie Heaney, in 1965, and they had two sons and a daughter. Seamus Heaney died, aged 74, in 2013.
This audio recording of Seamus Heaney, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1990, is used with the kind permission of Faber & Faber and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
Writers Off the Page is produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou. Marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon, as soon as we can be, with a whole new season of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.