Seamus Heaney at a turf bog in Bellaghy wearing his father's coat, hat and walking stick and additional shots in the Bellaghy bog, 1986. Bobbie Hanvey, photographer. (Credit: Flickr user bc-burnslibrary.)
Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, died today at 74. He was one of the few poets in the 21st century to bridge the gap between critical success and popular appeal, and he did it by writing poems filled with fleshy physicality. It's no surprise, then, that he could write about food like the best of them. One of his more famous poems, Blackberry Picking, made an almost holy experience out of the activity: "You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it."
He would have been dubbed a locavore, too, if the term had been invented when he started out, and he was definitely a forager. Writing about an elderberry shrub in his Glanmore Sonnets series, he calls the fruit "a swart caviar of shot, / A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple. ... It is shires dreaming wine." The food Heaney tended to celebrate was uncomplicated, earthy and delicious, much like his writing. Here are three more food-focused excerpts of his work, as a tribute:
