http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/seamus-heaney-obituary-nobel-prizewinning-irish-poet-8791807.html

I don't know if this is of interest to many Mudcatters, but poetry and music go hand in hand, so he may have admirers here.

His fourth collection, North (1975), was a stepping stone on the way to his ultimate status as the "greatest living poet" – the most widely read poet in English, possessor of incomparable gifts and impeccable instincts, and all the other superlatives heaped on him.

North was held by some to denote an artistic breakthrough, embodying as it did a new strength and sophistication following on from the pared-down, rural, evocations and intensities of the earlier collections. In Heaney's native Northern Ireland, though, its reception was less than adulatory. There were complicated reasons for this: for example, the "famous Seamus" brouhaha, which was starting up around this time, made a contrary assessment inevitable in the poet's home territory. More seriously, with the Troubles entering a horrific phase, it was felt that certain poems in the collection could be read as an endorsement of Republicanism, with Heaney displaying, at best, as one critic wrote, "a culpable ambiguity in [his] responses to atrocity". Such reservations were, I think, based on a misreading; Heaney was never an apologist for violence, despite the seeming drift of the much-quoted lines about "conniving" in civilised outrage, while understanding "the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge". His brief was large enough to accord a right of expression to every variety of belief. And if "the dark matter of the news headlines" got into Heaney's poetry, as it did at intervals from this time on - though always contained within an oblique and subtle, multi-layered and illuminating, modus operandi – the light he was aiming for, he said, "was the kind that derives from clarity of expression, from plain speaking."

SRS