Four Sides of Seamus Heaney

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Four Sides of Seamus Heaney: Seamus Heaney - The Troubles

Seamus Heaney - The Troubles

BBC Radio 4 - Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney - The Troubles

Gail McConnell on how  Seamus Heaney responded in his poetry to The Troubles in Ulster

Gail McConnell explores how Seamus Heaney, who died ten years ago, responded in his work to The Troubles in his native Northern Ireland with courage, subtlety and self scrutiny

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.

Gail McConnell has written about Seamus Heaney and his contemporaries and teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's, Belfast - the university where Heaney studied and taught. Heaney marched on Civil Rights demonstrations and lived in Belfast during the early years of The Troubles. 

McConnell, whose father was murdered by the IRA in front of their family home when she was three, considers the pressures Heaney and fellow poets were under, to write for one side or another, and the courage he showed in writing about murders, punishments and the complexities of the north of Ireland. 

When the bodies of executed people in the Iron Age were found preserved in bogs in Jutland, Heaney saw a parallel with the atrocities of his own society, such as tarring and feathering, and expressed this in his collection, North. McConnell explores the ensuing controversy with novelist Colm Toibin, and poet Leontia Flynn.

In his next collection, Field Work, Heaney revealed himself as far less certain, questioning himself, his role and writing elegies with great compassion. 

We hear Heaney reading some of his finest poems - Whatever You Say Say Nothing, Punishment and The Harvest Bow, which Professor Fran Brearton says is one of the great poems of the 20th century.  Rosie Lavan, co-editing Seamus Heaney's Complete Poems, and Colm Toibin, unpack his conviction of the importance, in times of trouble, of poetry.

Presenter: Gail McConnell
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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