Alice Oswald, “Various Portents”

An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but ⁠Stepping Stones⁠ (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in ⁠100 Poems⁠, and in the ⁠individual collections⁠.There are many ways to look at Heaney’s work, and the ten poems I choose only present one picture: a poet as at home on the farm as he was at Harvard; as interested in literary history as in archaeology and the deep interior of the Irish imagination; as concerned with childhood, memory, and family as with the darkest aspects of human life. In introducing these poems, I reflect on Heaney’s importance in my own life, and the huge impact his death had on me, ten years ago this month.The poems I read are:  Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist, 1966)The Forge and Bogland (Door into the Dark, 1969)The Tollund Man (Wintering Out, 1972)The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work, 1979)Squarings #2, #8, #40 (Seeing Things, 1991)from his translations of Beowulf (1999)Uncoupled (Human Chain, 2010)  The episode ends with Heaney's reading of "The Tollund Man."The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.