With a home in Sandymount, Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney must be the most famous of all local poets, and he has just celebrated his 70th birthday.

I was just building up my courage to ask him for an interview when I discovered that the definitive interview had already been conducted and made into a book, ‘Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney’ by his friend and fellow poet, Dennis O’Driscoll, running to an impressive 524 pages, published by Faber in 2008.

Evidently, even this is an edited version, as O’Driscoll said that ‘the questions I asked alone could have filled this many pages’. These ‘linked interviews’, as O’Driscoll calls them, set out to trace, book by book, the contours of Heaney’s writing life and the events and memories that inform it.

The title is taken from Heaney’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he described his “journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival– whether in one’s poetry or one’s life– turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.”

The first section, Bearings, consists of two short chapters which evoke Heaney’s childhood in rural County Derry. His family lived in ‘a one-storied, longish, lowish, thatched and whitewashed house about thirty yards in from the main road’. He remembers ‘the pleasure of tearing wallpaper off the wall beside the bed’ and the ‘pink, distempered plaster underneath’ on which he wrote.

O’Driscoll then takes Heaney on a journey through the key poems of his early collections, ‘Death of a Naturalist’, ‘Door into the Dark’, ‘Wintering Out’, and ‘North’, published in 1975. As the chapter headings indicate, the book uses Heaney’s work chronologically as a hook for the life, rather than putting the life at the forefront.

For a time, Heaney was criticised for his supposed reluctance to write about the Troubles directly in his poetry. ‘Field Work’, though, published four years later, contains several poems which treat the Troubles. ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ is an elegy for his second cousin, Colum McCartney, the victim of a loyalist killing gang, while ‘After a Killing’ alludes to the IRA’s assassination of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador in Dublin, an act that Heaney describes as ‘more like the breaking of an ancient taboo than a breach of international protocol’.

The book concludes with a chapter in which O’Driscoll asks about the serious stroke Heaney suffered in August 2006. Heaney commented at the time to Tom Kilroy that it was “the curse of Field Day,” as Brian Friel had had a stroke a year or so before. “When Brian came to visit me in hospital, his first words were ‘Different strokes for different folks’.” Heaney was grateful that he did not suffer any permanent impairment to “speech or memory or vision or humour.”

O’Driscoll asked, “What has poetry taught you?” Heaney answered, “That there’s such a thing as truth and it can be told– slant; that subjectivity is not to be theorised away and is worth defending; that poetry itself has virtue, in the first sense of possessing a quality of moral excellence and in the sense also of possessing inherent strength by reason by its sheer made-upness, its integratis, consonatia and claritas.’

O’Driscoll also addresses the downside of fame, the endless demands on one’s time and presence that take one away from the act of writing poetry, of “poetry readings, lectures, book launches, festivals, honorary degrees, exhibition openings, and all the time devouring travel and distraction which such activities entail.” Heaney replied that “lately I was becoming more successful at staying clear.”

The book also contains a chronology of Heaney’s life, a select bibliography, a ‘select’ list of other interviews– you would wonder Heaney had time to live in between being interviewed- and a biographical glossary of key individuals referred to in the text.

All in all, in my view this is a very useful addition to the Heaney stores, as it is very thorough and contextualises the poetry in the poet’s life as well as giving us insights into the writing itself.

Photo by Sean O’Connor