Seamus Heaney's friends recall the poet

My name is Damian Gorman.

I'm a poet and a playwright, and I live in Burnfoot, which is just across the border from Derry.

And I have always felt at home in the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, which isn't odd because I've always felt at home with Seamus Heaney's poetry right from the first time I came across it, which was in the library of my primary school, St Mary's Boys School in Newcastle, County Down, my hometown.

And I picked up a couple of books at the end of the '60s, um, Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, and I just felt they had something to do with me.

I had started to write poems at the time and, um, it was...

it meant an awful lot to me.

It gave me somewhere to go.

And, uh, I read, you know, I read Blackberry Picking, for example.

You know, "Late August, given heavy rain and sun for a full week, the blackberries would ripen." And I understood that and it had something to do with me.

And I mean, there were things in those books I didn't understand or I half understood.

You know, "All I know is a door into the dark." But just what he was at had something to do with what I wanted to be at, and was in my own way already at.

So it was very meaningful.

I can picture myself, I have pictured myself in the library of the Heaney HomePlace.

I have remembered being in the library of St Mary's Boys Primary School, and I can picture myself there right now Seamus' work, of course, is rooted in Bellaghy.

It's rooted in Mossbawn.

It's rooted in Derry.

It's rooted in Ireland.

But I think above all, it's rooted in music, you know? Eh, the, you know, as a lyric poet, obviously his, his instrument is music, but his thought process is music.

How he's meeting the world is music.

How he's turning things over, the tool with which he's turning things over on his particular ground that he's working is music, and I'll maybe come back to that a wee bit.

But, um, you know, his work, you know, it's for Mossbawn, it's for Bellaghy, it's for the world, but it, it's definitely for Ireland.

You know, I think it speaks to us very particularly.

I mean, it's no, it's no accident that it is a poem of his, um, which is Ireland's favorite poem voted for by the people of Ireland, um, a sonnet about his mother while all the others were away at Mass, and about them peeling potatoes together, and the potatoes falling, plashing into the water like solder weeping off a soldering iron.

That, we th- think and we thought, has something to do with us at a level that we loved him for it, you know? We love Seamus Heaney, [laughs] I think.

I do, anyway.