County Derry environmental issues influenced Seamus Heaney's writing

Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy will host a talk shedding light on how the County Derry environment and its pollution influenced Heaney's outlook and writing.

It will explore how Heaney’s poems not only focused on nature but also advanced environmental causes.

British poet and academic, Yvonne Reddick, will deliver the talk. She says Heaney was conscious of environmental issues since childhood.

“He saw waste from the milk factory at Castledawson polluting the Moyola, and he knew that water from a flax dam could kill fish if it got into the river,” she said.

“Later on, Heaney’s poetry tackles environmental issues more openly: his poems express concerns about dwindling bird numbers, deforestation, and especially climate change, which is an important focus of his book District and Circle.”

This influence was apparent later in Heaney's life when he donated poems to environmental causes close to his heart. He donated poems to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature and to the 'Save the Bog' campaign.

He was also involved in conservation in more direct ways.

“For many years, he opposed the new route of the A6 road, which cuts through boglands near Lough Beg.

“The Irish Times reported that he wrote, ‘Those undisturbed acres are as much a common spiritual resource as they are an ecological treasure’.

“He was involved with the conservation of the Lough: he contributed a lyrical foreword to an environmental management plan for Lough Beg,” Dr Reddick said.

She became interested in Heaney's environmental conscience when she looked at the National Library of Ireland's archive.

She got in touch with some of Heaney's relatives and was delighted to hear more about his support for environmental causes.

Her talk will explore in more detail how Heaney used his 'famous nature poems to help nature itself.'

“I’ll be speaking for 45 minutes about Heaney’s environmental writing, awareness and activism.

“I’ll be showing how he was concerned about, and helped to protect, landscapes close to his boyhood home – the River Moyola, Lough Beg’s wetlands and wildlife.

“I’m also planning to show how he supported bog conservation in the Republic of Ireland, worried about a melting Icelandic glacier, and imagined what one of his famous ‘bog-people' from Denmark would think about pollution and climate change,” she said.

Dr Reddick is excited to take the opportunity to check out some of the County Derry landmarks that feature in Heaney's poems.

“I’m looking forward to seeing Mossbawn, to visiting Anahorish, Heaney’s ‘place of clear water,’ and to seeing the Turfman sculpture at Bellaghy Bawn. I hope I’ll also be able to see some bird life near Lough Beg.”

Dr Reddick has experience examining the environmental motivations of poets. In 2017 she released a book about English poet Ted Hughes which interprets Hughes as an ‘ecopoet’, a writer of environmental prose, a ‘green’ activist, and a promoter of environmental education.

A pamphlet of her own poetry Translating Mountains won the Mslexia Magazine Pamphlet Competition and was selected as a favourite pamphlet of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. The talk will take place on Saturday, January 7 at 2pm. Tickets are available on the Seamus Heany HomePlace website.