Father’s Day

Write your Father’s Day poem in our Seamus Heaney card, blank for your own poem. Tell him what he means to you in your own words. Happy father’s Day with Kelly Cards.

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Seamus Heaney was a poet, translator, teacher and critic.

During a career spanning fifty years, he became one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. While often rooted in the landscape of his native Northern Ireland, Heaney’s poetry has a universal appeal that was to find a worldwide readership. During his lifetime he was the recipient of many honours, including the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, and his work has been translated into 27 languages.

His legacy lives on, as readers continue to enjoy and engage with his poetry, prose, drama and translations, and through the Estate of Seamus Heaney, set up by his family to preserve and promote his work.

‘Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.’
from ‘Digging’

Among his peers in the literary community, Heaney is perhaps best remembered for his generosity of spirit and unstinting support of younger writers, championing them in public and encouraging them in private correspondence. (He was particularly devoted to sending postcards to friends and family.) Famously, an early recipient of this support was the young Paul Muldoon, but there were countless others to whom he acted as a guiding spirit. He was a supporter and patron of many poetry organisations and prizes – including Poetry Ireland, the Poetry Archive, the Irish Literary Society and Poetry Aloud.

His untimely death in Dublin on 30 August 2013, after a short illness, prompted a huge outpouring of grief in his native Ireland and around the world. Fellow writers expressed their sorrow and shock, paying tribute in obituaries to Heaney’s exceptional gifts as a poet and his personal warmth, while international figures spoke of his legacy beyond the world of letters, with President Bill Clinton calling him ‘a powerful voice for peace’.

Today, Heaney’s legacy continues through his poetry, which is taught in classrooms around the world, and remains beloved by readers of all ages. In 2015, his poem ‘Clearances iii’­ (‘When all the others were away at Mass’) was voted Ireland’s favourite poem of the past 100 years.

In 2004, the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry opened at Queen’s University Belfast, Heaney’s alma mater, and offers undergraduate and postgraduate tuition in creative writing as well as events and a poetry prize. In 2011, Heaney donated his literary papers and notebooks to the National Library of Ireland, so that they would find a permanent home in Ireland and be accessible to scholars and anyone with an interest in his work. The Heaney papers are among the most consulted of Library’s collections. Manuscripts and notebooks from this collection form the basis of a major new exhibition, Listen Now Again, which opened in July 2018 in the Bank of Ireland Culture and Heritage Centre at College Green in Dublin. In 2016, the Seamus Heaney HomePlace opened in his home village of Bellaghy, County Derry. An award-winning arts and literary centre, it houses a permanent exhibition celebrating his life and poetry, amid the landscape that inspired it.

Through the ongoing work of these institutions and the Estate of Seamus Heaney – as well as his readers, fellow writers and scholars around the world – Seamus Heaney’s legacy continues today.  Most of all, it lives on through the poems themselves.

https://www.seamusheaney.com/new-page

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