‘Listen Now Again’ To Seamus Heaney
DUBLIN — On a December day seven years ago, the poet Seamus Heaney drove up to the back door of the National Library of Ireland, his car packed with 12 boxes of attic.
The haul was more than 10,000 pieces of paper — drafts of poems on envelopes and halfway-there typescripts, even a clipping of one he first published in a daily newspaper and later reworked in pen and pencil on the printed page. Plus lined notebooks, galleys and so on, the archive of a productive literary life.
Now that collection and other sources have been harvested to create a tasting menu of Heaney, young to old, in “Listen Now Again,” an exhibit to be housed for three years in a cultural space at the Bank of Ireland on College Green, here in Dublin.
At t he t i me of t he gif t , Heaney, 72, was a global bardic presence, a Nobel laureate wreathed in acclaim as one of the leading poets in the world.
But also, still the dutiful eldest son of a thatched farmstead in rural County Derry, Northern Ireland, who lugged the boxes to the library himself. “They filled the boot of a good-sized sedan with a couple more in the back seat,” recalled Mick He- aney, a son who helped. “It was a quite prosaic transaction.”
Heaney wove eloquence and beguiling modesty into a single strand that ran through his public life. It also ties together the exhibit, from the entryway — a circle of pillars evocative of Neolithic standing stones, decorated with moments in the Heaney biography and oeuvre — to the exit, where a street-artist’s painting of Heaney’s last words are projected on a Dublin tenement. (“Don’t be afraid,” it says, a translation of Noli timere, the Latin text he sent on August 30, 2013, to his wife as he waited for surgery to repair a splitting aorta; he died before the surgery took place.)
The exhibit has about 100 items and gives them a multimedia charge with audio readings, videos and screens that show the progress of revisions in the blink of a digital eye.
Heaney’s voice and vision made poetry from blackberry picking and ritual murder; from peeled potatoes in a bucket and epic travels in the afterlife; from a glimpse of his wife plunging into a swimming pool, and the tug of an airborne kite — “a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff” — as he handed its string to his sons.
The exhibit shows the gears of his poem-making. Writing in the margin of a newspaper clipping, Heaney fortified a version of “Postscript” first published in The Irish Times. Became:
A video gives Ireland’s response to Heaney’s death at 74. “The nation is a man down,” says a letter to the Irish Times.
A camera sweeps across 80,000 people at Dublin’s Croke Park, awaiting kickoff at a match, two days after his death. An announcer i ntones: “We would l i ke to mark the passing of one of our greatest l iterary icons, Seamus Heaney.” Applause rose, gathering into a prolonged ovation.
Invited to silence to honor Heaney’s death, the crowd roared for his life.