Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Seamus Heaney, a poet who lived from 1939 to 2013. He was an Irish poet,

playwright, and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. And the sixth anniversary

of his death just occurred. And I wanted to experiment with something here on the podcast,

something I've never done before. The anniversary of his death coincided with the release of a collection of poems from throughout

his life. He had had this idea to release a collection with different poems he selected from

different years in his life. Unfortunately, he passed away before he was able to do that.

But his children and his wife took up the mantle on that effort, and they

released this new book called Shamis Heaney 100 poems. So I'd like to do for the four days we have

this week, yesterday being Labor Day, of course, is to read four different poems from four different

periods in his life. We'll call it Seamus Heaney Weeker,

if you like, I want to see if we can identify some ways that his poems are evolving or changing

over the years and look at a couple of the poems that he personally had earmarked and

then that his family selected for this collection. I think it's pretty

meaningful that they chose a hundred specific poems, trying to maybe get a sense of why.

The first poem that I'm going to read is called Death of a Naturalist, and this is the title poem

from a 1966 collection, the first collection

that Hini released

that was really notable

and really well received.

It was again,

like I said,

...