Heaney remembered at Southbank celebration

November 21, 2013

Seamus Heaney Collected Poems (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the darkness, on the bank of the Thames, Seamus Heaney’s voice, one so recently gone, filled the hall, “Between my finger and my thumb. The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”

Tickets for the celebration in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall of the life of Ireland’s greatest modern poet had been gone for weeks, with holders warned to hand back the unwanted.

A photograph of Heaney as a young man filled the backdrop, photographs that aged as the evening progressed, telling the story of his life through the changes in his poetry.

The uilleann pipes of Liam O’Flynn and Neil Martin’s cello set the Irish tone for the evening, one captured later by the The Chieftains with “Lullaby for the Dead”.

Poet, Andrew O’Hagan described his late friend as “an anchor for poetry” who had replenished the imagination, one whose every word issued tolerance.