Personal Choice Volume 2 No.36

At the restaurant, Seamus immediately ordered a bottle of Muscadet, and swallowing his first mouthful, he said that it was his eleventh year at Harvard and he no longer felt terrified returning. ‘Terrified about what?’ I asked. And he replied that it was painful to leave his family for four months every year, and to interrupt his writing, in order to teach American students. His wife, Marie, who appears in many memorable poems, stayed on in Dublin with their young family, making it possible for Seamus to travel annually to Harvard. To start, Seamus ordered cherrystone clams and I had a half-dozen oysters, which we ate raw, squeezing lemon juice on the creamy beige, slightly salty meat. A cherrystone clam is a hard-shell clam, with a thick, tough shell, and these were heart-shaped, with concentric growth lines, like those on a tree trunk.

My platter of oysters made me think of Seamus’s poem, ‘Oysters,’ in which he describes them as ‘alive and violated,’ and lying on ‘beds of ice, and ‘ripped and shucked and scattered.’  It is the opening poem in Seamus’s beautiful collection Field Work, which I read when I was a graduate student and just beginning to appreciate contemporary poetry, but I was changed by it, as unripe fruit is changed by the sun.

Dinner With Seamus Heaney: A Remembrance Henri Cole

from Oysters

Our shells clacked on the plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary,

My palate hung with starlight:

As I tasted the salty Pleiades

Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,

They lay on their bed of ice: . . .

And was angry that my trust could not repose

In the clear light, like poetry or freedom

Leaning in from sea. I ate the day

Deliberately, that its tang

Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats,’ and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was ‘the greatest poet of our age.’ Robert Pinsky has stated that ‘with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller.’ Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world’.