Seamus Heaney: he had the sort of face that would make your nan say “he looks like a poet” and you’d know exactly what she meant.
Although his spirited reading of one of the more dramatic parts of Beowulf during the Harold International Arts Festival 2007 had such a profound effect on the more suggestible members of the audience that it triggered what has been referred to ever since as The Grendel Incident which resulted in several thousand pounds worth of property damage and the loss of at least one testicle, villagers are today remembering with fondness the poet Seamus Heaney who has died aged 74.
“It’s Clearances that always moves me,” said Col. Thomas Hallet as he walked his dog on the recreation ground and wished it could remember that trying to eat bees never ends well. “Written after the death of his mother – ‘Then she was dead, The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned and we all knew one thing by being there. The space we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep‘ – beautiful. I’d always planned on reading it at my own mother’s funeral but do you know I’ve almost given up on that wish. Costing us a fortune in care home fees she is. A bloody fortune.’
“We did him in English last year,” said Clare Evans as she hung around the High Street looking bored and waiting to be eighteen. “At first I thought it was all crap about potatoes and digging and that but it was really good. I was sad when Mr Pierce said poetry was boring and we had to watch the Angelina Jolie film instead.”
In tribute to the memory of a fine poet and Nobel Laureate tonight will be Guinness and Poetry Night in the Squirrel Licker’s Arms. Eddie the landlord has cautioned that anyone asking for a shamrock on their Guinness or reciting anything by Carol Ann Duffy will be barred as is she until she clears her tab.
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