大象传媒

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner and one of the most famous, and finest, poets writing in English, died in August 2013. 大象传媒 Radio 4 is marking this with Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, four programmes, each focusing on a different aspect of his work, each with a different presenter with personal knowledge of the poet.

In the first programme John Kelly, poet and broadcaster with RTE, visits the village of Bellaghy in Country Derry, where Heaney was born, lived on a farm until he went to secondary school, and where he is buried. Though he spent most of his life in the Republic of Ireland, taught in America and travelled all over the world, much of Heaney's poetry is rooted in his homeplace, the landscape, its people and their work, and their language. One his earliest poems describes ploughing, one of his last a baler. "He never really left the parish," says Dan Heaney, one of Seamus's brothers.

Dan takes John to the sculpture of a turf digger and shares something few know about the genesis of the famous poem, 'Digging'. They go to the Strand at Lough Beg where in the poem of that name Seamus imagines meeting his cousin, murdered in the Troubles. And they visit the family's farmyard.

The old police station in Bellaghy is now the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, a library and performance space where the 'Word Hoard' displays the local vocabulary Heaney employs. Maura Johnston explains how its riches lie in Shakespeare's English, in Irish and Ulster Scots. She and Bernard O'Donoghue, specialist in Medieval Literature and Modern Irish Poetry, read closely, to reveal how Heaney asserts his Irish identity through English, subtly, inclusively decolonising the language.

And from the archive and recordings we hear Heaney reading his work.

Producer: Julian May