Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Sinead Morrissey 'The Lightbox' Philip Terry 'What is Poetry' Ned Denny 'Nine Poems after Verlaine' Sasha Dugdale 'On learning that Russian mothers buy their soldier sons lucky belts inscribed with Psalm 90 to wear into battle' Rod Mengham 'Cold War Hot Air'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This article is taken from PN Review 280, Volume 51 Number 2, November - December 2024.

Heaney the Correspondent and Translator John McAuliffe
1.
In ‘The Conway Stewart’, a poem from his final collection, Human Chain (2010), Seamus Heaney puts letter-writing at the centre of his writing life. The poem describes his parents’ gifting him a fountain pen when they arrive for the first time to boarding school in Derry: the Conway Stewart pen’s ‘pump-action lever’ nods to the pen, ‘snug as a gun’, in another ‘inaugural’ poem, ‘Digging’; then, there’s a play on his distinctive sound-palette as he describes refilling the pen: ‘Guttery, snottery, / Letting it rest then at an angle / To ingest’; finally, the poem recounts the advent of one part of his writing life – as a boarder posting letters home, ‘my longhand / ‘Dear’ / to them next day’. These letters home will, though, be a way of keeping the lines of communication open rather than a place where the stricken child will confess how he feels. What he cannot say in letters will, decades later, be the subject of the poems themselves, including other heartsore memories in ‘Album’, a defining sequence in Human Chain.

Letter-writing remained part of Heaney’s daily practice, connected to and – to borrow a word he liked to use – corroborating the poems. And in The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Christopher Reid, ed., Faber, £40), we see, to its editor’s credit, that the poems are at the centre of the letters. Even more than in his proxy autobiography Stepping Stones, we see the force fields he encountered, and entered, and which he was both shaped by and sometimes shaped to his own ends as a poet. ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image