I am writing from Ulster, where I am attending the opening of HomePlace, the arts space dedicated to the memory of Seamus Heaney, in the village where he was born, Bellaghy. I am not here as a poetry or travel writer but because of the rich material he drew from family life.
I am joined to a tour showing sites evoked by some of his most famous poems. Mossbawn, where his four-year-old brother Christopher died in a road accident, is recorded in Mid-Term Break. At Broagh, subject of the poem of the same name, we visited his grandmother’s house, and then saw the turf bogs cut by his father in Digging. It was an instructive and touching experience to see his words so directly linked to physical structures and places and people.
At the exhibition itself, one was struck that as much space was devoted to family as to Heaney himself – and there was plenty of material as he was one of nine siblings. Giant photos of Heaney, as man and boy, introduce you to the exhibition – the passage of time in family is also thick within Heaney’s work. These portraits are, in a sense, dwarfed by the smaller portraits of siblings, children, parents, uncles and aunts that punctuate much of the remainder of the exhibition.
I was struck by how romantic the poems about family are, after a fashion. The rough edges are not his concern, the arguments and conflicts, of which I assume there must have been at least some. The world of childhood and clan that Heaney evokes, even when it involves death and loss, is somehow, while profoundly honest, always respectful, a tribute rather than the brutal dissections we are more used to in a confessional world.
I hope it doesn’t diminish his greatness to suggest that Heaney could almost be seen, implicitly or explicitly, as a proselytiser for family life. When one looks at portraits of him with his wife, Marie, and adoring and adored outgrowths of Heaneys and McCanns (his mother’s family), one cannot help feel a little envy mixed in with the admiration – not only for the astonishing quality of his writerly eye but also what seemed like a form of almost idyllic domestic accord and rootedness.
But all poets must have their own take. This is not what I took away from the exhibition in particular, other than learning more about Heaney’s poetry, of which I had only scant knowledge. What was striking was the renewed understanding (and perhaps this is the trademark of all good, or in this case, great, poets) that nothing, nothing at all, in the family and nothing of it that falls in the memory is ordinary. We just deem it so, and fail to notice it as it happens. Family love is not big or flashy, but apparently – and only apparently – small, intimate and faintly marked, even invisible.
As Heaney himself observes: “What I had taken as a matter of fact in childhood became a matter of wonder in memory.” A typical piece of writing on this theme takes place in one of his most famous poems, When All the Others Were Away at Mass, in which he simply recalls peeling potatoes as a child with his mother, from the perspective of observing her on her death bed:
So while the parish priest at her bedside / Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying / And some were responding and some crying / I remembered her head towards my head, / Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives– / Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
The space itself, should anyone reading this be intending to visit Ulster in the near future, is a wonder. And the poetry that it showcases pulls us out of our accustomed torpor to recognise the treasure most of us lucky ones possess, and yet do not always see until we are looking back on it from a distance.
