You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

Well, good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome. It's a lovely afternoon, and there could be no better place to be than right here on the banks of the river with such a guest as

Colm Toibine. And my name is Michael McGur and it's great to have met you just now Colm and to begin chatting.

I think a good place to start and perhaps we wouldn't have expected this beforehand,

is we were talking just before about the death of Seamus Heaney

and what a figure he has been in your life and the life of Ireland.

And I'm wondering what your thoughts are today,

with Seamus Heaney having passed away just yesterday.

I think for anyone my age, he was born in 1939. I was born in 1955. This first book came out in 1966. But yet, I remember when I had

my first summer job, I had money, and I went to Dublin.

And I had in my head that I had to get a book called Death of a Naturalist.

Somehow, rather, the news had come down to Enniscorthy, where I was from it, this book was something I would need.

And, of course, the description of life on a farm. I wasn't from a farm, but there was a sort of familiarity about the sky over the poems,

the land the poems wrote about, and the sort of idiom of the poems.

And when I was 18, as a student, we invited him to the university, and I got to know him then so I've really I'd

really known him for 40 years and he's been a huge influence on the entire society because

we were let down by so many people in Ireland who are in positions of leadership for example

on the side of the church on the side of the church, on the side of the

politicians, that he and people like him, but he was really primary among these people who

insisted on a sort of seriousness without a solemnity, that he was a commanding figure on a platform when he read his poems. He believed in the word. And he was a commanding figure on a platform when he read his poems he believed in the word

and he believed in getting the word right but afterwards or even as an intro as a way of introducing

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