The boy is back

摘要

Forty years ago a young Irish Catholic poet called Seamus Heaney, son of an Ulster farming family, brought out a slim collection of verse called "Death of a Naturalist". That book was remarkable for the way in which it memorialised his childhood in County Derry in the 1940s through a sequence of poems that were dense, rich and fresh with the particulars of manual labour. The cycle of the turning year was described with loving care: blackberry-picking, turning hay, digging potatoes. And at the centre of that rural world was Mr Heaney's own, taciturn, farmer father, "coarse boot nestled on the lug" of his spade as he prepared to sink it into gravelly ground.