Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
