A display of digging

SEAMUS HEANEY moved seamlessly through time, space and cultural worlds, or at least he made it appear that way. When, in 2013, the Irish poet was buried near his childhood home in the mid-Ulster village of Bellaghy, mourners ranged from senior Irish Republicans to British grandees, from rock stars and world-famous academics to local folk who were part of or knew his farming family. His poetry, too, was at once recondite and scholarly and deeply embedded in his home soil. Although he made bold new readings of Greek and Anglo-Saxon classics, his best-loved works speak of more immediate, tangible things like flax rotting in a dam or his father’s spade slicing the Derry mud.

Visitors will gain new insights into the poet’s personal and family roots with the opening on September 30th of the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, a spanking new arts and literary centre in still-sleepy Bellaghy. Mementoes of his early life will form an interactive display along with reminiscences from local friends, and film of the writer in local settings. Over the next year it will host cultural performances with the ambitious goal of fusing the local and international dimensions of the poet’s world. The launch was due to include a concert by nine traditional musicians from across the globe and, a few days later, a dawn reading in nearby Church Island, a numinous ancient site dear to the writer’s heart, of a Heaney poem dealing with ancient Mycenae and hinting at the 1994 Northern Irish ceasefire.

With his gentle humour, Heaney might have found that event slightly pretentious. But its staging reflects his keen sense of the multilayered riddles that can be contained in pieces of ground which have bound people together, and also divided them, over different eras. As the discerning visitor to HomePlace may sense, the poet emerged from a slow but conflict-ridden world: a place where Catholic and Protestant farmers could deal amicably over cattle or ploughing without ever forgetting that they were, ultimately, on opposite sides of an intercommunal divide which had drawn blood and might draw more.

Heaney knew which side of that divide he came from: it was the Catholic, Irish-nationalist community, and he politely objected whenever he was carelessly described as British. But it was precisely that sense of security which steered him away from name-calling Anglophobia or from joining the militant end of Irish Republicanism. He had a keen sense of the pain of the Northern Irish conflict, including the sectarian murder of a young cousin, but showed no desire to become a foot-soldier.

Perhaps abhorrence of bloodshed was one reason why the poet, who famously declared that he dug with his pen, felt moved to delve so very deep into the past, of his own country and others. He was seeking ways to transcend the feuds of the present, or at least to put them in better perspective. He had a particular affinity with Greece, another country where the landscape contains both traces of ancient mysteries and the detritus of sordid modern arguments. And in a line quoted at the time of the ceasefire, he never abandoned his belief in the advent of a day when, against all expectations, conflict would be overcome so that “hope and history rhyme”.