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An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn\\u2019t hard to come by details of Heaney\\u2019s life, but Stepping Stones (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in 100 Poems, and in the individual collections.
\\nThere are many ways to look at Heaney\\u2019s work, and the ten poems I choose only present one picture: a poet as at home on the farm as he was at Harvard; as interested in literary history as in archaeology and the deep interior of the Irish imagination; as concerned with childhood, memory, and family as with the darkest aspects of human life. In introducing these poems, I reflect on Heaney\\u2019s importance in my own life, and the huge impact his death had on me, ten years ago this month.
\\nThe poems I read are: \\xa0
\\nThe episode ends with Heaney\'s reading of "The Tollund Man."
\\nDon\\u2019t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.
\\nAny comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
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