Top 6 - Seamus Heaney

If anybody knows the whereabouts of a spare ticket for Seamus Heaney's reading in London on Sept 14, please get in touch and name your price. It just goes to show that you really shouldn't leave the internet alone for more than a couple of days or else you might miss something important.

I'd also be interested if anyone has ever seen a bad review of Heaney since there might never have been such a thing.

I had been leaving his Top 6 for a guest to do if anybody fancied the job but since now seems a good time to be celebrating him, I've spent a glorious sunlit couple of hours sitting under a whitewashed gable to do the job myself.

I had no need to check on A Brigid's Girdle, one of my favourite poems by anybody ever and as lovely as a piece of harp music.

Soon after it comes Sunlight, a memory of his mother that a friend of mine once said made him get up and do a jig around the room after reading it and he wasn't wrong.

The early Personal Helicon is more self-consciously literary in intent but made a statement of purpose that he lived up to ever since.

Re-reading the pile of books I have here brought to light a few lesser known pieces that I'd like to highlight hear rather than nominate the established anthology pieces. Servant Boy is one that made an early impression and retains a place among highlights but The Outlaw was a tremendous find, an account of taking a cow to be serviced by an unlicensed bull at another farm, the bull described as,

Unhurried as an old steam engine shunting.

and Victorian Guitar, a relic of a girl's lost life as herself before marriage seems to have stolen her individual identity as a musician allowed to express herself while her guitar has a continuing life in other hands.

Of course, there's more to it than that and I choose the more lyrical, sympathetic Heaney over his meditations on primitive violence and archaeology but it's a personal choice and allcomers are welcome to pick an entirely different six should the urge take them.