Four Sides of Seamus Heaney

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Four Sides of Seamus Heaney: Seamus Heaney - Love Poet

Seamus Heaney - Love Poet

BBC Radio 4 - Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney - Love Poet

Seamus Heaney's daughter, Catherine, on her father's poetry of love, of different kinds

Seamus Heaney, a greatly loved poet when he died ten years ago, wrote great poems of love - love of different kinds. His daughter Catherine delves into their rich variety.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner and one of the best loved poets writing in English, died in August, 2013. BBC Radio 4 is marking this with Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, four programmes, each on a different aspect of his work, each with a different presenter with personal knowledge of the poet.

In the second programme Seamus Heaney's daughter, Catherine, explores love in her father's poems. 'And here is love/ like a tin smith's scoop/ sunk past its gleam/ in the meal-bin.' These are the concluding lines of a poem dedicated to his aunt, Mary Heaney, who is baking in the kitchen. In the kitchen of her childhood home in Dublin Catherine Heaney talks to her mother, Marie, who shows her the handwritten book of love poems Seamus gave her in 1983, in lieu of a Christmas present. One is about the morning of Catherine's birth. There were to be another three decades' worth of love poems.

In 1972 Heaney gave up the security of a job as a lecturer at Queen's University, and the insecurity of life in Belfast at the height of The Troubles, and moved to Glanmore, a cottage in rural Wicklow, to devote himself to writing. In the kitchen Catherine hears from her brothers Christopher and Michael about that time and the poems he wrote, including 'A Kite for Michael and Christopher', a poem of love - but a tough one.

Paula Meehan, a former Ireland Professor of Poetry, reveals how 'The Blackbird of Glanmore', a late poem, connects Heaney with the very beginnings of Irish poetry. Rosie Lavan,  co-editor of the forthcoming Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney, looks to the early poems to show how for Heaney love is never simple.

In Dublin, and in Wicklow, Seamus Heaney's words are written on walls - because people love them.

Presenter: Catherine Heaney
Producer: Julian May

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Series exploring different aspects of the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize-winner and one of the most famous, and finest, poets writing in English, died in August 2013. BBC 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.

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