Seamus Heaney:

Abstract

In late 1979 and early 1980, the late Seamus Heaney was in a flurry of activity. Employed from 1976 to 1981 as head of the English Department at Carysfort, a teachers' training college in Dublin, in 1979 he spent a semester teaching a poetry workshop at Harvard University where in January 1982 he began a five-year contract teaching one semester a year. Field Work, published by Faber and Faber, was issued on 15 October 1979, and in November, Charlotte Press Publications, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, published Gravities: A Collection of Poems with drawings by Noel Connor. Also in a limited edition in December 1979, the Byron Press produced Heaney's A Family Album.On 5 February 1980, Heaney found time to visit, read his poems, and speak at St. Mary's Catholic teachers' training college, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex. He was interviewed after his reading by a student named Georginia Mills. This subsequently was published in the literary magazine Strawberry Fare produced by the English Department at St. Mary's College. During its short run the magazine published fascinating interviews with leading literary figures, apart from Heaney these included Peter Porter, David Lodge, Beryl Bainbridge, D. J. Enright, Michael Holroyd, Richard Ellmann, Tom Stoppard, and others. Today, copies of the journal are extremely scarce; it ran from the mid-1970s to Autumn 1989. An incomplete run is in the British Library, call mark ZK.9. a. 41. A complete run is held in the archives of the college, which generously sent most of its duplicate copies to the present writer.John Iddon, who lectured at St Mary's College from 1970 to 2000 and edited the Strawberry Fare issue of Autumn 1980 in which Heaney's interview appeared (pp. 14–18), has generously given permission for it to be reprinted as has Faber and Faber permissions department responsible for the publication of Seamus Heaney's writings. The interview is recorded in Rand Brandes and the late Michael J. Durkan's magnificent Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography 1959–2003 as item F 17 (p. 426). It is followed in Strawberry Fare by Heaney's: “Hercules and Antaeus” (Brandes and Durkan: C326). The interview contains some references that need brief explication. “Summer 1969” refers to a poem in the second part of Heaney's collection North, published by Faber and Faber in 1975. Other Heaney poems referred to are “A Constable Calls,” “The Ministry of Fear,” and “Fosterage” found in North, and “Kinship,” appearing in Bog poems, also published in 1975. Georgina Mills [GM] refers to Heaney's experiences at “St Columbus” echoing St Columb's College, in Derry City where Heaney was a boarder from 1951 to 1957. Heaney's close friend Seamus Deane (b. 1940) the novelist, poet, and critic also attended St Columb's at the same time as Seamus Heaney. Ian Crichton Smith (1928–1998) was a prolific Scottish author from a strict Presbyterian background who wrote in English and Scottish Gaelic. Michael McClaverty (1904–1992), “a short story writer” and Heaney's “first headmaster” when he taught in 1962–1963 at St Thomas' Secondary School along the Whiterock Road in the upper Falls Road area of West Belfast, wrote novels and short stories. In this interview there are also references to Joyce, to Tacitus, to W. B. Yeats's poetry, the significance of Antaeus, and Philip Larkin's “Toads.”