This work provides tremendous insight into the inner workings of a great mind that allows readers to greater appreciate his work.

I love collections of letters. Sometimes seeing bits of a personal life can feel voyeuristic, and it is, but what I'm drawn to in letters are glimpses at the human being behind a well known figure.

Heaney is someone I was introduced to through Beowulf. I shamefully didn't look at anything else by him for a while. It was a pleasant surprise to find more of his work. It was just as pleasant to get a copy of these letters.

This collection has some great moments of complete normalcy, like forgetting to contact people or neglecting to mention a birth, but they’re done by Heaney so they’re charming. Or, at least, he’s charming while he confesses it.

Some letters are him sharing poems, talking about poetry readings, seeking feedback on collections and what should be included.

I enjoyed learning some of the background to a poem I like titled “Anything Can Happen’, originally titled “Horace and the Thunder”. It came about after the September 11 attacks when Heaney spent hours in front of the tv, feeling “inadequate yet uneasy about marching into public grief”.

The editor, Christopher Reid, does a tremendous amount of work here. He had to track these down, talk to people, piece them together, some of them are marked with a Best Guess on dates. Reid provides context for the letters and notes to help readers understand references and relationships. Sometimes we want to know who is being talked about, what poem is being talked about, what the older name was versus what the published name is, all of this is provided with expert detail by Reid.

I'll leave this review with Heaney's own words:
“Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.”

The compilation of letters gave a very personal insight into Seamus Heaney’s private life. The correspondence demonstrates a real connection with his friends and colleagues. His efforts to help other upcoming poets is reflective of a caring and generous nature,
The insight into his family life and coping with the everyday challenges of new parenthood are described eloquently in a down to earth manner.
This is a glimpse into the ordinary life of an extraordinary person.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this collection of letters that allows readers a peak into the thoughts, ideas, tribulations, and everyday thoughts that lead to some of the most powerful and beautiful poems written.

I used to write a lot of letters. To relatives, to family, and to friends. A person I worked with mentioned she was having a hard time in college being away from what she knew, so I wrote a letter a week, about customers, books, movies and lots and lots of bad jokes. She still has them, and mentions them whenever we meet. I am sure I would look at those works and despair, but they meant a lot to her at the time, and I would like to think still do. That is the power of the written word, something that email and text can't convey. Letters are physical and unlike emails and texts might last, and tell us about the life that was being lived at the time. Sure emails and texts are saved on "The Cloud", but clouds dissipate. As technology grows, older technology is forgotten and becomes expensive to keep track of, or to use. Where one can open a simple letter, it might take a lot to open a document in Bank Street Writer, which I had on my Commodore 64, or early Word. Seamus Heaney was a man of letters, who also wrote a lot of letters. Letters of praise to friends and poets, thoughts of America to fellow teachers, letters about incidents, and ideas that might come to pass. These letters show a man of warmth, and rare talent, making his work even richer and deeper. The Letters of Seamus Heaney is edited by Christopher Reid, who worked with Heaney during his career. This collection features letters from the early 60's to the end of the poet's life.

Christopher Reid begins the book with an introduction on how the book was compiled, what was included and what had to be excluded. These were mostly letters to family. Reid discusses working with Heaney first on other writings, and how Heaney even in collections like this and biographies didn't want to lose to much of himself in presenting his life and letters to the world. The letters start in the early 1960's with praise for other poets, mentions of what is going on, and talk of an engagement with his wife Marie Devlin, the one big constant in his life. As the letters go on, readers learn of works being published in newspapers, being picked by publishers, buying a home, and having a Volkswagen. Success invited Heaney to America for teaching, which opened his eyes to a world that was new and different, and showed in his letters from the time. Moving from Northern Ireland to the South led to troubles and again this is covered in select letters. Ideas, bigger ideas, influences, the anger at his works that arose, and this lack of acceptance are present. As well as near the end the many letters from hospitals, and health centers, dealing with strokes, eye problems, and work that might never be done.

I'm not sure if I am just a busybody, or like to know as much as I can about those whose works I enjoy, but I love collections of letters. I feel unlike biographies, which might have a chapter called before they were famous, followed by a chapter called suddenly famous, one can see the slow rise of a person in their field. Submitting a few poems to a paper, getting picked up by a publisher. Reading a book that makes Heaney go, hmm I could do something with this, doing so and creating a legacy. One sees the small victories among the mundane, and watch a talent grow. The letters have a lot of humor, and a lot of references that might go over one's head, but that is part of the fun. Reid does a good job of explaining the people, what was going on at the time, what this comment might mean, etc.

A very fine collection, and one that really shows the poet in different stages from begining, to sadly the end. Readers of Heaney will enjoy the insight, fans of books about creatives will enjoy the up and down cycles of creativity. Chrisopher Reid has done an outstanding job.

A beautiful collection of the authors works - be prepared to feel with this new collection of letters!

Friends and fellow poets regarded Seamus Heaney as a kindly yet guarded soul. To Les Murray, Heaney followed to the letter his mother’s edict ‘whatever you say, say nothing.’ With the 2008 publication of the interviews collected in Stepping Stones, the first restricted access to the poet’s inner sanctum was granted. No other source brought you closer to the man behind the poems – that is, until now. From the letters selected here by Christopher Reid, judiciously chosen from almost 50 years of correspondence, we now know the poet had grave misgivings about the book and went sleepless for weeks in dread of its eventual appearance.

That might seem like a bad reason for publishing these letters. Yet we should rest easy. Full co-operation and blessings from surviving family members has been sought and obtained; Heaney himself made clear he wanted his letters to be preserved and published. We should be rather grateful for that. The letters are worthy compliments to the poems – evocative, generous, warm; and they add a wittier, bawdier, intensely human dimension all of their own.

Some may lament the absence of domestic drama compared with those of Heaney’s friend and contemporary, Ted Hughes. That is perhaps another way of saying Heaney was better at being happy. There is certainly no sense of impending personal tragedy – rather, in fact, the opposite. From the first letter included in the volume, the tone is set. Heaney informs a friend he has been engaged to Marie Devlin for a fortnight; the couple plan to marry in August the following year. They are very happy and believe they ‘can remain so for a lifetime.’ In this book, the couple does exactly that. For once, domestic bliss is enhanced, not diminished, by the reader’s overview.

Where biographies present the life as a done deal, selected letters, like diaries, supply the vicarious pleasure of watching life being lived from day to day. They also do better justice to the fords in the river of time, the many spots where things might have gone differently. Heaney’s first poetry collection was submitted to the small, Dublin-based Dolmen Press, and titled An Advancement of Learning. Though it shared several poems with the published debut, a score of pieces had yet to be removed and replaced with finer work. In part, Heaney bypassed the standard route of submitting work, collecting rejection slips and, with luck, eventually finding a publisher.

Instead, a publisher found him. After reading three of Heaney’s poems in The Listener, Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber wrote to the author and directly solicited his work. We get to see – as Heaney did not – the junior editor’s report on the typescript that would become Death of a Naturalist: ‘a large batch of childish folklore has been weeded out and replaced by a number of new poems which, though they have their weaknesses, show far more assurance and co-ordination between description and comment.’ A copy of the book was sent to Ted Hughes, also one of Monteith’s discoveries, and destined to be a lifelong friend of Heaney’s. Hughes’s response to the poems seems surprising: he gave top marks to ‘Churning Day’, ‘At A Potato Digging’, ‘Cow in Calf’, ‘Trout’, ‘Gravities’ and ‘Synge on Aran’ but disliked ‘Digging’, ‘Follower’ and the title poem. Unless Hughes was being modest, he didn’t appear to spot the influence of his own work on poems like ‘Turkeys Observed’ or ‘Docker.’ Regarding the latter, set in Belfast’s notoriously discriminatory shipyards, the poem apparently contains a mistake: the title character would have been a Catholic and not a Protestant.

Early success brought offers to teach in America. The idea of Heaney and the Haight-Ashbury may seem the stuff of comedy sketches, yet it seems his time teaching at Berkeley was spent happily. It certainly seemed to shake the mud from his boots. The eight-minute walk to work provided fantastic scenes on a daily basis – drop-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, local children wearing clothes made of lace curtains. He enjoyed teaching and lecturing on poetry and grew to love the greater ease and luxury of American life. He had never worked so hard at teaching nor enjoyed it so much – meeting the informed and unstuffy was a tonic for the soul. Writing classes, emphatically, were not; his ‘stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible’ students drained him to the very marrow.

America, however, had widened his horizons, and the restrictions of life in Northern Ireland – particularly as The Troubles began to flare up - were no longer tolerable. When Heaney moved with his family to Wicklow in the Irish Republic, the Reverend Ian Paisley’s newspaper marked the occasion by printing his address and denouncing him as a ‘papist propagandist.’ At this time, he first discovered P.V. Glob’s classic archaeological study The Bog People – about the preserved peat-bog corpses of Denmark - and hit with him with the force of revelation. It was, as he put it, a rising obsession to strike before it went cold. It’s clear in retrospect it was a case of the right material appearing at the right time. The bodies inspired a new direction in his work – leaner, more open to risk. They also showed an author increasingly willing to confront The Troubles on his own terms, searching history and myth for symbols equal and true to Ireland’s strife.

The poems that accumulated became the book North and a watershed in his career. That must have been little consolation. The collection drew the most polarised reviews of Heaney’s career. To some critics, Irish and British, the poems were worse than an insult. The poet Ciaran Carson, a former pupil of Heaney’s, denounced him in print as an apologist for terrorism and a mythologiser of violence. Presumably Carson was never taught Chekhov’s maxim that the role of the artist isn’t to provide solutions but to pose the question correctly. Thankfully Heaney had the support of friends like Brian Friel and Ted Hughes. Heaney and Hughes repeatedly sent each other their early drafts, becoming the first audience for material that would bring international fame to both. Readers may well hope for a full-length volume of letters solely between them. In a letter sent before Christmas 1972, Heaney remarks to Hughes of a story about an eighteenth-century Irish poet who supposedly died of a relapse during a fever brought on by masturbating. (‘Clerical exemplum, perhaps, but inviting and extensive when you think of all of those centuries of honeymoons in the hand.’)

Never one to rest on his laurels, Heaney’s art continued to break up the guarded ground. Before, all he had known was a door into the dark. Now, he sought a door into the light. Metaphysical themes began to dominate his work. In Station Island, the title sequence takes place in a pilgrimage site in Lough Derg, County Donegal, and describes a series of dream-meetings with a parade of literary and personal ghosts. His next two collections – Seeing Things and The Spirit Level – continued to mine the new metaphysical seam. He lamented the fact that he only learned, at age fifty, ‘to credit marvels’ and increasingly sought a space – and a language – for the numinous. While his work had never wanted for quotability, lines from The Cure at Troy, his 1991 translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, achieved proverbial status as the Northern Ireland peace process gathered momentum. They have since been quoted by pop stars and American Presidents:

‘History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.’

Some today still wonder whether the timing of Heaney’s Nobel Prize in 1995 – the fourth Irishman to win it in a single century - owed more to the Northern Ireland peace process than to his poetry. Others may prefer to think that, in its way, the peace process owed something vital to the poetry. Heaney resolutely ignored requests from fellow Catholics chivvying him for more political verses, just as he made it clear to well-meaning anthologists that he was not a British poet but an Irish one. By trusting in and steering by his own coordinates, he sang for far more than ‘the wee six.’ Perhaps it is this as much as his subject matter that has helped to give his poetry its feeling of moral integrity: ‘The written line, that is, which can be in its own way a kind of front line. It’s the truth - artistic as well as moral truth - that counts.’

Surprisingly, there aren’t as many letters about the Nobel as you may think. In public, he referred it to as a ‘mostly benign’ avalanche. In private, he referred to it as ‘the N-word.’ The impact seems to have been devastating - and one of the most desolate letters in the collection dates from this time. Though he had seldom lacked for job offers, suddenly everyone wanted him to blurb this, lecture here, attend dinner there, judge that. At times he felt like poetry had given way to clocking up air miles. Reid jokes that Heaney so often wrote on AER Lingus notepaper - Flight EI 117 from Dublin - that he might reasonably have considered having special notepaper printed for himself. Heaney’s later years were often bleak as family and friend sickened and passed away and his own health began to fail. But what strikes the reader is how rarely his sense of humour failed:

‘This day two weeks ago I was in Kyoto with a bunch of beet-rua-ing Japanese, at a hooley organized by the Paddy faction in that city (well, there are paddy fields aren’t there)?’

‘This was a long-promised trip – to glamorous Stoke on Trent.’

[To his Italian translator]: The school leaver under the bench is being ‘No-Good Boyo,’ as Dylan Thomas called an adolescent in Under Milk Wood. Experimenting with himself, as you elegantly put it.’

[Writing to a friend from his hospital bed about a fellow patient]: ‘At first I couldn’t bear him, in the end I enjoyed the performance immensely. He had worked as a joiner in London for 20 years, roamed Kilburn, smoked more than Woodbine and spoke longingly of the Flamingo in Soho. His fantasies were understandable, modest enough, and constantly proclaimed: a six pack or a dozen Guinness, a half bottle of Powers Gold Label, and an afternoon with his fishing rod on Dún Laoghaire Pier. It’s only as I write this I realize how much I liked the old bugger in the end.’

The letters invite you to walk a lifetime in a man’s shoes - and the man in question was a farmer’s son who became one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets. They paint a joyous picture of a man who wrote warmly to students, bucked up friends after they received a stinging review, wrote moving verse-letters to stroke victims, loved to let a newcomer know his promise - and even had a kind word for Tom Paulin. Like the poems, the letters have power to ‘catch the heart off guard and blow it wide open.’ Heaneyboppers old, new, and yet unborn, are in for a treat.

With this nature of book, it is hard to review. However, Seamus Heaney is a poet whose work I really enjoy. I am a poet myself, so I understand the life of a poet. These letters from Heaney have been collected together in the most efficient way. If you are at all interested in a writer's life, then do pick this up!

This was such a good book! I really love this author so I was so excited to get to read this book. The plot was so good I could not put it down until I finished! The characters were unique and I loved the journey and turmoil they went through. I will be recommending this book to all of my friends and family.

The Letters of Seamus Heaney by Seamus Heaney is absorbing, immersive, beeautiful

I fell in love with the poetry of Seamus Heaney when it was on the curriculum at school (many, many years ago, 35 to be exact) and since then, have always had them memorised, so when there was an opportunity to glean some further insight into the mind of this incredible wordsmith, I jumped at it and I was not at al disappointed

What a delight, what an absolute joy to read these letters, to see how this incredible poet evolved as his life changed, always maintaining his friendships, valuing people, his deep humanity and affability, his incredible mind

I would recomend this book very highly to any reader, any author, any lover of literature as it is a wonderful insight to how true greatness comes to be and how it is intrinsically linked to a deep seated humility

Thank you to Netgalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the incredible Seamus Heaney for this incredible ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own