To Elizabeth Bishop
12 July 1979 33 Gnarled Hollow Road,
East Setauket, Long Island, NY 01733
Dear Elizabeth,
Tucked in the middle of this stuff you’ll find a poem dedicated to you which is not good enough but has one or two images which we probably share. I hope you and Alice get some pleasure from it: it’s really a billet-doux.
I’ve an idea that some day I might do a collection called ‘Giveaways’ and these poems, or some of them, would be included. Each one would be dedicated to, and have some internal connection with what they used to call in Berkeley ‘a real human being.’
I’ve done a number of these since coming to America, and the ‘Villanelle’, ‘Hank of Wool’ and ‘Late Offerings’ since coming here.
I have to be in Vermont on July 23 so I may call you about then—I’d love to come up but I doubt if I can make it. All our love to you and Alice,
Seamus
[Postscript at the head of the letter:] Marie spends much time on her back in the sun. It’s beginning to show. On her.
The dedicated poem was ‘A Hank of Wool’, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 7 March 1980 but was not included by SH in any subsequent volume: in it, he describes holding wool for Bishop while she wound it into a ball—a service that seems to imply an unspoken connection between them. Bishop’s death a few months later allowed him to add ‘i.m. Elizabeth Bishop’ below the title. On the reverse of a postcard showing Gentile Bellini’s A Turkish Artist, which SH sent later in the month, he apologises for not being able to pay a visit after all: ‘I’ve just looked at the map and realized that the Burlington/Sabine Farm trip is quite complicated and that my time is going faster and faster.’ The original ‘Sabine Farm’, country estate of the Latin poet Horace, was a gift from his patron, Maecenas.
To Robert Lowell
6 September 1975 Glanmore Cottage, Ashford,
Co. Wicklow
Dear Robert,
After that special and memorable time, I feel it not only proper but necessary to direct salutations towards you again: this time last week we were cloudy in that bar in Kilkenny. And while it is prob-ably needless to say my gratitude for all the talk and the confirmation through and in the talk, I’m saying it anyhow. This is just to let you know that on Sunday 21st next, at around ten o’clock in the evening, there’s a recording of a talk I did for the Third Programme being broad-cast which I’d like you to hear if you can. It’s a shortened version of a lecture I did for the Royal Society of Literature last year, an attempt at a mini-Prelude. It’s a bit po-faced and narcissistic but there’s a strong grain of truth in it also. I hope.
I’m enclosing also a poem I did a few months ago that came out of a visit to Cooke’s in 1972, before we had left Belfast, when Barrie andSonja were urging me to cut away from the academic life – if you could call what we had in Belfast academic life. I think it’s more sure-footed than those too metrical and melodious sonnets that I now regret having given you.
Elgy’s piece wasn’t too bad in the end. Good, even. And the people at Radio Eireann were huffed that I hadn’t made a recording/interview with you. I said that it wasn’t possible in the domestic circumstances of the Cookery, so they said that if you wanted to come to Dublin at their expense at any time, that would be all right, and we could do it in a studio. So there the matter rests. I only mention it in case you ever feel like another weekend in the Dublin area – we could do a half-hour or forty-five-minute piece to be broadcast here when The Day appears, for example. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s entirely up to yourself.I don’t suppose you got as far as Antibes: it was as much as I could do to make it back to Ashford. But I’ve finally got back in front of the desk, even if I haven’t yet got into my stride.
All our love to yourself and Caroline and the children.
Seamus
PS I should have taken the Kent address – I’m sending this via Fabers.
S.
‘special and memorable time’: Lowell had not only agreed to read at the Kilkenny Festival, but he stayed on for several days.The lecture, later broadcast, that SH recommends was ‘Feeling into Words’.‘Elgy’: the Irish Times journalist, Elgy Gillespie (b.1950), whose piece ‘Robert Lowell in Kilkenny’ had appeared in the paper on 4 September.
To Homero Aridjis
1 September 1981 191 Strand Road, Dublin 4
Dear Homero,
It was the best fortnight in our lives and I cannot thank you enough for the opportunity you gave us to share in the whole experience. Morelia was one long climax and it was a cause of great satisfaction to all of us that the official artistic events of the evenings were as triumphantly successful as the social occasions in the afternoons and afterwards in the nights.
The culture of the country, the energy of the hospitality, the care of the Fonapas girls, the magnificence of Villa Montana, the personal hospitality, the official welcome, the whole sense of occasion, the constant note of celebration, the good poetic company, how powerful it all was! In memory, it remains as warm and alive as ever! To meet Borges then, and to have the driver and interpreter in Mexico: it was like a dream come true, yet I have a gold coin in my pocket to prove that it was no dream. You deserve all the credit for putting things into action: and for letting us see the Dance of the Old Men, the masks, the copper-beating, the Comensales . . . Our love to Betty and you, and our everlasting gratitude. We’ll keep in touch!
Seamus
In August, SH had been a guest at the First Morelia International Poetry Festival in Mexico, organised by the poet and novelist Homero Aridjis (b.1940) and his wife(also his translator) Betty Ferber. The starry guest list included – in addition to the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) – João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920–99) from Brazil, Andrei Voznesensky (1933–2010) from the USSR, Vasko Popa (1922–91) from Yugoslavia, Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014) from Poland, Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) from Sweden, Günter Grass (1927–2015) from West Germany, and numerous others. The gold coin, a centenario, was payment for a television interview. The final festival dinner was held at the restaurant Los Comensales.
To Joseph Brodksy
19 June 1993 Hotel Central, Rotterdam
Cher Poète,
Why is there no time?
Skimmed them again. ‘Cappadocia’ is the full orchestra, magnificently managed. Some notes in need of tuning here and there, I think. I’ve annotated where I think the sound wobbles. But I admire the big slam.
‘Lullaby’ the surest note, I think. I can see the swashbuckling intent and can appreciate the rattle and flourish of ‘Anti-Shenandoah’—but I don’t love it as much. It’s brilliant but I feel the speed of the lines—no, not the speed—the inevitability of the fit between cadence and intelligence is not always there. I babble. But throw the hat in the air too –
In haste.
S.
Brodsky in his later years wrote poems in English, although his command of the language, its structures and idioms, wobbled as much as the sounds did; here it appears that SH had been shown poems that would appear in Brodsky’s final collection,So Forth (1996).‘In haste’: the sprawling handwriting, covering two sheets of Hotel Central fax paper, says as much.
Excerpted from THE LETTERS OF SEAMUS HEANEY. Selected and Edited by Christopher Reid. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Letters copyright © 2023 by The Estate of Seamus Heaney. Introduction and editorial material copyright © 2023 by Christopher Reid. All rights reserved.