Pure Poetry: Seamus Heaney at UNLV

Melissa Schorr

Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1999 | 10:07 a.m.

Bob Tracy's quest has finally come to an end.

The associate dean of UNLV's College of Fine Arts has succeeded in bringing the dean of modern Irish poetry, 1995 Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney, 59, to campus, where he will speak on Friday night and sign copies of his latest book, "Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996."

Heaney, 59, a Dublin-based writer, is acclaimed for his work, which often touches upon the troubles in his native land. Many of his poems are moving memorials to those who were killed in the bombings of Northern Ireland.

"I look for artists who have a solidarity with what's happening in their lifetime, who have a way of expressing substance in their work," Tracy says. "This is someone to listen to, someone who has the ability to look into the dark recesses of an open door and tell you what's beyond it."

Tracy's odyssey began after a trip in the fall of 1996 to Northern Ireland, where he toured artists' studios. Returning home, Tracy decided to put together an Irish festival at UNLV, featuring the work of Northern and Southern Ireland's contemporary artists.

"I remember telling myself that I wanted as a featured component a great poet, and the first name that comes to mind is Seamus Heaney," Tracy explained last week.

Establishing the festival, now in its second year, was simple. But getting squeezed into Heaney's busy scheudle took 21 /2 years of campaigning and waiting. Finally, Heaney agreed to stop in Las Vegas this week as one of only four speaking engagements in the West that he will make this trip.

Heaney is speaking for the relatively modest sum of $6,500, which is being funded through the University's Forum Series, the Nevada Humanities Committee, the UNLV English department, and the Rio hotel-casino.

"He is a voice that is on the world stage, not the national (stage), but the world (stage)," Tracy points out, predicting the turnout for Heaney may be anywhere from 200 to 300 people. "I think people want to be in the presence of a kind of greatness. How many times do you have a chance to spend an evening with someone of that renown?"

Heaney was born a Catholic, one of nine children, on a farm outside Belfast in 1939. He enrolled at Queen's College and studied English. After graduating, he began teaching English, ending up at St. Joseph's College in Belfast.

While there, in 1966, Heaney published his first volume in verse, "Death of a Naturalist," at the age of 27, which won him several literary awards. His second volumne, "Door into the Dark," was published in 1969, followed by "Wintering Out," "North" "The Haw Lantern" and "Seeing Things."

In 1976, he moved his family to Dublin, where he became department head at Carysfort College in Dublin. He eventually became a professor of poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994, and a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he is currently the Ralph Waldo Emerson poet in residence.

In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Nobel committee praised him for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

"He's a poet who combines a kind of agrarian love of his land and country with a sense of political responsibility to a deeply troubled country, and (that) his poetry manages to do both of those things is wondrous," says UNLV English professor Chris Hudgins, chairman of the Nevada Humanities Committee.

English professors say it is not by chance that Heaney is one of a long line of literary figures to hail from Ireland, including novelists such as James Joyce and Frank McCourt, and poets such as Nobel Prize-winner William Butler Yeats.

"The Irish literary tradition has been long established," Hudgins notes. "The notion of a country that is troubled produces great literature, and also a lot of people suggested the wonderful Irish melodic language is part and parcel of the country's heritage. Heaney is at the contemporary end of a real long tradition."

Heaney, who was the world literary community's odds-on favorite to win the Nobel Prize for several years before he finally did so, won more for his literary accomplishments than for his political viewpoints, Hudgins adds.

"Heaney's work for me provides startling new and different ways of looking at a reality that's foreign from mine but recognizable," Hudgins explains, plucking a poem from random from Heaney's new collection, called "On Blackberry Picking," and beginning to read a stanza.

"It's just grand," he sighs.

"Everybody has their own definition of why (poetry) is important," Hudgins says, explaining his own definition: "(Poetry) makes us see our world afresh, through the lenses of another person. And the form itself, like music or dance, is simply beautiful -- even if that beauty is on a topic that's pretty dark. I think it refreshes the spirit."

In Heaney's Nobel Lecture "Crediting Poetry," a speech traditionally given to the literary community upon accepting the prize, he spoke to the power of poetry:

It has, Heaney said, "the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness, in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being."