[




Poetry is not some grand 
institution, insists Nobel Prize-winner 
Seamus Heaney. It's "born out 
of the quarrel with ourselves."



By RICHARD COVINGTON









[L] 



oping into the hall overflowing with fans, Seamus Heaney climbs nimbly onto the raised platform. Out of breath and florid with the risen Irish blood flush in his face, the poet surveys the room with a bemused expression. At 57, the athletic Heaney still manages to fit infrequent bicycle racing and the odd amateur rugby matches in between shuttling from a teaching chair at Harvard and his harborside home in Dublin. Although his 

[Kinko's and self-esteem]

thatch of white hair looks as wild and mussed as if he's just come off a rugby field, Heaney has escaped nothing more exhausting than an admiring mob of autograph-seekers gathered here at the Paris book fair around the 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. 

"These authors' forums remind me of a form of spectator sport," he wryly observes. "Inevitably, there's bound to be a lot of hot air to them." Hot air is the last thing you think of when Seamus Heaney takes the stage. In his lectures at Harvard, students are sometimes moved to tears. In Dublin, accompanied by a harpist, the audiences  respond in rapt silence as Heaney reads aloud a 16th-century Polish poem he translated, about a father lamenting the death of his daughter. The poem suggests the death of Heaney's own younger brother, elegized in "Mid-Term Break," an understated handling of grief that ends describing the corpse: 







. . . Paler now


Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.


A four foot box, a foot for every year. 







The Paris audience is not disappointed. Heaney speaks with an effortless, lyrical profundity that dazzles. 
"Each person is on Earth to make sense of themselves and for themselves and to bring the inchoateness of this self into an expressible state," he reflects. "These are the essential and redemptive steps of poetry." 



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