The Poems of Seamus Heaney, ed. Rosie Lavin and Bernard O’Donoghue (Faber, 2025)

The windfall of The Poems of Seamus Heaney is the twenty-five unpublished poems, selected by the Heaney family. Of these, ‘Black Walnuts’ alone might justify the whole endeavour. Written a month before his death, it’s typical of late Heaney: the momentary impression glimpsed in the precise moment of its departure with no attempt to coerce or trap it under glass. ‘Black walnuts hitting a barn roof  Fairly rapped the morning,’ it begins. Even at this late stage, Heaney was ever-ready and constantly surprised by the supply lines of poetry:

                but at exactly what
Interval none of us could tell.

An interruption of the usual, brief, but echoing the presaging wind of ‘Had I not been awake’, the opening poem from his final volume, Human Chain. This fugitive moment is given weight by learning that it was drafted on the back of another poem, ‘Those Winter Evenings’, ‘in the same brown ink’, suggesting ‘a concomitant path’ as editors Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue put it. In this context, we think we might discern those elusive supply lines, even at this remove, in a single word: ‘interval’:

Those winter evenings we walked the strand
Watching lights of planes coming in above
Howth Head, sailing down the dark,
Beginning their descent high in the east.
Each on the same flight path
At staggered intervals —

In giving us these glimpses the meticulous labours ...