What They Said ...
"It was a rare pleasure to read at the Seamus Heaney Centre. I've read in Ireland and Northern Ireland a number of times, and have always been pleasantly gratified by the audience response, but at the Centre I admit to being actually taken aback by the enthusiasm, sophistication and spontaneity of the audience. One can always sense when an audience is really listening, and listening to the aspects of one's work one would best like it to, but in this case the attentiveness and seriousness of the people there, students and others, was really quite wonderful, and that the house was full made it of course even better. I felt the experience was something like what it must be for a singer to appear at La Scala, with an audience which appreciates the subtleties of the craft, and responds accordingly. It was all splendid."
C. K. Williams, Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize
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"It was a great pleasure to come and read at the Seamus Heaney Centre, and to find academics and practitioners in such fruitful dialogue. The Centre seems to draw together all aspects of the poetry world and attracts an impressively broad and attentive audience to such events. I didn't feel I was behind the university walls so much as in the midst of the city's poetic life."
Lavinia Greenlaw, whose collection Minsk was shortlisted for the Forward, T.S. Eliot and Whitbread Poetry Prizes.
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"There was something very apposite, and deeply gratifying, about coming to the newly-founded Seamus Heaney Centre to give my first public lecture to coincide with the publication of my completed biography of Yeats. The audience included many of the brilliant poets writing in Northern Ireland today, and I felt the sense of a
beginning as well as an ending. Seamus Heaney once said a poem should ideally give us 'the preciousness and foundedness of wise feeling become eternally posthumous in perfect cadence... something sweetening and at the same time unexpected, something that has come through constraint into felicity'.A poet's biography can't hope to
provide as much, though it can try and show how such things are made. But for Irish poetry, the Heaney Centre will carry the enabling process that vital stage further."
Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College , Oxford
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"The audience for my reading at Queen's University was quite large. It consisted of about three quarters adults and one quarter students – an unusual and, for me, accustomed as I am to the exact reverse, a very refreshing ratio. Old and young alike listened with the keen intensity found in people of high intelligence. They had a robust sense of humour. All in all they drew from me, according to my wife, who has a very substantial basis for comparison, one of my best renderings ever of the poems."
Galway Kinnell, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize
