COMMON GROUND
Seamus Heaney’s family has helped to curate the first exhibition in the city where he settled
IT says much about Seamus Heaney as a poet that when it came to finding a resting place for his personal notebooks and manuscripts, he wanted them to have a forever home in Ireland, specifically at the National Library.
Yet it says much about Heaney the man that when the time came to donate the many boxes of materials, he drove them to Kildare Street himself in 2011, two years before his death. Along with his son Christopher, he hauled the boxes up the stairs of the library.
‘I think I came in the car behind them,’ laughs Heaney’s beloved widow Marie.
‘When he started to think for a home for his manuscripts, he wanted them to be available for consultation by scholars and the general public alike.
‘And he’d be amazed and delighted with what was achieved with the material in those cardboard boxes.’
Marie is referring to Listen Now Again, the new major exhibition of Seamus Heaney’s works in the Republic.
It’s the first exhibition to be housed at the Bank Of Ireland’s Cultural & Heritage Centre on Dublin’s College Green.
Heaney fans have been able to enjoy a celebration of his life and work at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace in his birthplace of Bellaghy, Co. Derry, but Listen Now Again is distinguished as one of the biggest celebrations of Heaney in his second home of Dublin,
AMID moving and emotional scenes, the exhibition was opened earlier this week by President Michael D. Higgins, a close family friend of the Heaneys. Along with Marie, the three Heaney children Michael, Christopher and Catherine were in attendance, as were Heaney’s grandchildren Anna Rose, Aibhín and Síofra, as well as two of his surviving brothers.
The family has collaborated for the past two years with the exhibit’s curator, Geraldine Higgins, and her team.
The end result is one of the most vivid and intimate displays of the beloved literary figure.
Once the National Library’s archivist Frances Clarke had filed and labelled every artefact, it was Higgins’ considerable task to go through every scrap of paper and pare it down to a comprehensive collection.
‘I have a friend who describes academics as people who go into the ocean to make a cup of tea, and it was a bit like that,’ Higgins laughs. ‘You really do have to look at everything.
‘I’ve known the Heaney family for a long time — I’m from Ballymena, about 15 miles away from Bellaghy.
‘Like many people in Ireland, Seamus Heaney has been an important part of my life, reading him, and hearing him.;
And like so many others, Higgins has her own memories of the late great poet as a man who had an extraordinary bond with people from all walks of life.
‘My favourite memory of Seamus Heaney is that you could never be in a room with him, without him paying attention to everybody,’ Higgins explains.
‘He never excluded anybody, and everyone was central to him. Everyone who walks in the door has a story about how he signed their book or shook their hand.
‘Where else would you find a poet who would get a minute’s silence from 80,000 people in Croke Park?,’ she adds.
One of the most delightful things that Higgins found while working on the exhibition were the rough drafts and old revisions of poems that the public already knows and loves.
‘Often, we think of poetry as a finished thing, or something that arrives via the muse or inspiration, but here, we see (Seamus) at work, picking up the pen, crossing out words. It’s fascinating,’ Higgins enthuses.
‘There were so many amazing moments while doing this, but one of the funniest moments I had while curating this was finding an earlier draft of “Bogland” and seeing that instead of writing “soft as pulp”, he initially wrote “soft as banana”.
‘Often, the lines that get most quoted didn’t make the page until quite late.’
More than that, Listen Now Again enlightens visitors about the personal workings of the man behind the poetry; a family man, a politically aware man and, by all accounts, a generous mentor to others. The Heaneys donated a number of personal items to the exhibition, including one of the poet’s old work desks, a replica of his Nobel Prize Medal, a bronze bust of the poet, and a watercolour painting by Louis Le Brocquy.
In addition to old editions of his books, there is a bounty of old family photographs, as well as letters of encouragement sent to younger poets like Paul Durcan.
As Michael D. Higgins noted in his speech, Heaney liked to send a personalised set of Christmas cards to close family and friends each year, and some of these — bearing new, seasonal verse — are also there for all to enjoy. Vast seascapes of Sandymount, the leafy Dublin suburb where Heaney lived with his family, take pride of place on the walls. Topping and tailing the exhibition too are specially commissioned art works by Maser.
‘We called (the first one) Let Go, Let Fly, Forget, after a Heaney poem, and it’s a sculpture where sheets of paper transform into birds,’ Higgins explains. ‘At the end, we’ve recreated his “Don’t Be Afraid” mural in lights. At Seamus’ funeral, Mick said that “Noli Timere” (Don’t Be Afraid) were the last words he texted to Marie, and Maser was very inspired by that. I think people will really connect to that piece.’
Higgins hopes that the exhibition will be enjoyed not just by Irish people who have a huge place in their hearts for Heaney, but by international visitors, too.
‘I teach at Emory University in Atlanta and I’ve seen that people from all over the world used to flock to hear Seamus read,’ says Higgins.
‘If there’s an Irish poet people know in America, it’s Seamus Heaney, or perhaps WB Yeats.’
Yet closer to home, Seamus Heaney was central to the lives of many an Irish youngster who first encountered his poetry in school.
‘We’ve definitely tried to make him accessible for people who didn’t encounter him in the Leaving Cert,’ says Higgins. ‘With this exhibition, he’ll uplift you and take you somewhere else, beyond what you’d expect.’
Listen Now Again opens today and will run in the Bank of Ireland Cultural and Heritage Centre, Dublin, until December 2021. Further information is available at nli.ie