Seamus Heaney’s family on life with the great poet: ‘He was always just Dad at home'

Ahead of a Dublin exhibition of the poet’s archive, the Heaney family explain how they put together a new collection to reflect his life as a husband and father, as well as a Nobel laureate

In 2011, when Seamus Heaney announced that he would donate his papers to the National Library of Ireland (NLI), it was a source of much pride, and a little relief, for the library. There had been some speculation that the archive would go to Harvard, where Heaney had taught for many years. When the day came for the papers to be delivered, “I think the director of the library presumed there’d be a van and minions”, recalls Heaney’s son Michael. “But there was Dad carrying the boxes. He’d put them in the back of the family car and brought them round himself. It was all done very casually, but there was also a weird sense of momentousness, so much so that it felt right for us to have a drink to mark the occasion with my brother, Christopher, afterwards.”

The episode is emblematic of Heaney’s status in Ireland as a figure who is not only hugely revered for his creativity and intellect, but also loved for being approachable and down to earth. Two years later, when Heaney died unexpectedly aged 74, his family learned just how much he had meant to people, and not just in Ireland. “I was utterly taken aback by the response,” says his widow, Marie. “And I wondered whether he would have been, too. But there he was, above the fold on the front page of the New York Times, with a story about Obama and Syria down the side. It was something extraordinary to experience alongside our shock and our grief.”

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2lLBsw4