Ten years ago in September 2013, the Irish Literary Society approached me to put together a presentation to celebrate the life and work of Seamus Heaney, their then President, whose passing on 30 August 2013 was such a loss to family, friends and his many admirers. To mark the 10th anniversary of his passing, the ILS are hosting an event focused on Heaney’s engagement with classical literature at the Hammersmith Irish Cultural Centre. The poet explained the role of the classical world in his work by observing that ‘consciousness needs coordinates, we need ways of locating ourselves in cultural as well as geographical space’. The evening will include readings by Esther Armstrong, Stephen Harrison, Catherine Heaney, Bernard O’Donoghue, and myself, along with clips from interviews with Declan Kiberd and Rachel Falconer conducted by Esther Armstrong..
‘Virgil had his River Mincius, I have my River Moyola. Virgil moved from his father’s farm in the North to a poet’s retreat outside Naples in the South, I made [a] similar move from Ulster to Wicklow to Dublin. Virgil lived through civil war in the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination. I have experienced not only the civic violence of Ulster, but thanks to the age of technology, I have witnessed civil wars and ethnic conflicts all over the globe, blanket bombing and terrorist attacks’ Seamus Heaney, ‘Towers, Trees, Terrors: A reverie in Urbino’, in Gabriella Morisco (ed),