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Fermoy poet Gene Barry, who paid tribute to the late Seamus Heaney. Photo: John Ahern

Local poet and organiser of Fermoy's International Poetry Festival, Gene Barry, spoke of his reaction to news of the death of poet Seamus Heaney earlier this year. He'd just arrived in London when he heard the news. "There was no immediate infusion of sadness or loss, but a pushing of the pause button which in turn enabled me to reflect," he recounted.

"I visited the memory of our conversation in Listowel about the driver of the van mentioned in Midterm Break, and swam in my favourite poems in the three books I have signed by him," Gene recalled, saying  "As the weight of our country’s loss crept in, in tandem so did his achievements. I am not referring here to his successful accomplishments, but rather to his humanity. In an interview with Henri Cole for the Paris Review, Heaney said, ‘I believed that poetry would come as a grace and would force itself through whenever it needed to come’.

Gene recalled the poet's friend Paul Muldoon saying of him: ‘He had that single ability to make each of us feel connected, not only to him but to one another. No one did so much to make us feel like creatures of a long-working imagination rather than figments of a short-term market’.

Born into the workings of an old rural country emerging into a modern globalised Ireland, Heaney, just as the country he loved, continued to evolve, Gene says.  "This aspect, along with many more is portrayed in this stanza from his fine poem Terminus:             

Two buckets were easier carried than one.
I grew up in between.

I was the last earl on horseback in midstream
Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.'

"As an ambassador for the entire institution of poetry, Seamus Heaney’s cadence and diction have been matched by so few. He had a readiness to go out of his way to support poets and indeed poetry. His pen delivered to us human suffering, haunting, sounds forgotten, alienation and love in the stunning freshness of his language. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Robert Faggen said, ‘He remained committed to poetry and to one of the things poetry can do: make our suffering almost bearable, whether, as he wrote in St. Kevin and the Blackbird; in a "land of dreams or a darkling plain."

In this free verse poem, St Kevin and the Blackbird, Gene says Heaney cleverly transmits the thoughts and sensations in the saint’s mind into the mind of the reader. "This poem of love, for me equates the monk’s sacrifice to the poet’s availability to poets. Seamus Heaney’s countless honours including the Nobel Prize served as inspirations for all aspiring poets. In his poem Digging Death of a Naturalist from his 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist, he introduces us to three generations through sounds and smells, through life and death, through old and young" Gene explains:

Between my finger and thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

"As poets we have no choice but to dig, and so I shall. Seamus Heaney’s loss is immeasurable to all of us; so too is what we have and will continue to gain from what he has unselfishly given to us. May he rest in peace," the Fermoy poet concluded.

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