Nobel prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney attends closely to life. The natural world reveals itself afresh to his gaze. And when tracing the contours of human experience, he can catch readers off-guard bringing to light unexpected moments of tenderness, discovery, or wonder.
For Heaney, reality matters: words give voice to the matter-at-hand. Having spent more than 50 years finding words for that which comes into view, his writing covers a great deal of territory: people, places and events that are well traversed in Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney.
One theme that caught my attention in these interviews was that of the meaning and practice of faith. Heaney's reflections about his own journey of faith bring to light important aspects of a more general cultural shift in the West.
As a young, Catholic university student in late 1950s Belfast, Heaney three times made the penitential pilgrimage to Lough Derg, a sanctuary of St Patrick in County Donegal. He entered seriously into the ritual walk, the repetition of prayers, and the fast.
In retrospect he sees that it was the external challenge that held his attention back then: the walking unshod, the struggling to stay awake, and the fasting. 'You were necessarily concentrated on getting through it but not necessarily absorbed in sacred reverie,' he remembers.
Not that it was without its rewards: he was buoyed by the company of friends and on completion found the experience cathartic.
Through the '60s and '70s a change occurred. Catholic vocabulary and practices slipped from Heaney's view as he turned his attention at first to university life and later to a career in poetry, to marriage and a young family.
There was also, of course, the secular temper of the age: 'a general, generational assent to the proposition that God is dead'. He experienced as a loss the fading power of Catholic ritual and prayer in his life. Until then it had been a source of great refreshment.
Thirty or more years hence, he still does not make the leap of faith yet a renewed appreciation of the sacred pervades his work. To some degree this was a result of his immersion in the classics of Western culture, particularly Dante's Commedia, which re-awakened the depth of meaning in Catholic cosmology.
But the language of his Catholic past has found new power now. In the poem 'Out of This World', he traces the journey from his childhood