Every artist begins a journey but few have sustained it as eloquently and as doggedly as Seamus Heaney who has won this year's TS Eliot prize for poetry. The award, worth £10,000, was presented last night in London for Heaney's latest collection, District and Circle. It has previously been won by Les Murray and Ted Hughes, as well as Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley.
It is named in honour of TS Eliot and presented by his widow, Valerie Eliot. Heaney, who has been ill recently, was unable to attend the ceremony.
For Heaney, the 1995 Nobel literature laureate, it is yet another honour in a career which began in 1966 with Death of a Naturalistand has since spanned 40 years.
This year's TS Eliot award was a hard-run race, particularly as Muldoon was also shortlisted for Horse Latitudes, while another contender, the Scot Robin Robertson had already won the Foreword Prize.
Long acknowledged as the most widely read poet currently writing in English, Heaney is probably the most popular, and he has achieved this popularity without compromising his artistic integrity.
District and Circleis an exceptional achievement, as vital a benchmark as are North(1975), Field Work(1979), Seeing Things(1991) and The Spirit Level(1996), and it is also an important statement. It is his 12th collection and his first in five years.
It characteristically draws on memory but it also articulates his increasing awareness of the menace undermining society, the global as well as the local. The collective classical spirit of Homer, Virgil, Horace and Dante inform his intelligence as does that of Kavanagh.
Death is a major theme in District and Circleand the title, while reflecting images of the London underground system - and "underground" here acquires dark and mythic resonance - while "district" signifies local terrain and "circle" as in enduring themes, the cyclical and its relevance in his work.
The familiar physical and mythic imagery, the rural traditions, life blood of his work, are here balanced by the long slow anger directed at terrorists - be they on the rampage in the North of Ireland or murdering the innocent of New York or Baghdad.
A sense of the aftermath of disaster informs the volume and this is most movingly expressed in a beautiful version of Rilke's After The Fire, a poem about a house fire and the impact the tragedy has on a young man and the way in which his community now perceive him.
Elsewhere, in Anahorish 1944, the simple practice of recalling what exactly was being done at a moment of great importance becomes a historical record. The poem, In Iowaalso captures a moment of recognition as the poet recalls noticing "abandoned in the open gap" a mowing machine. He muses about its former importance, the role it would have had in the lives lived.
Quitting Timesums up a day in the life of a farmer, and the sound of a gate closing, "the song of a tubular steel" before beginning "his uphill trek". A day's end becomes a memorial. Most beautiful of all is The Blackbird of Glanmorewith its echo of an early poem, Mid Term Break, and a further elegy to his dead brother. In this new poem, the long dead sibling joins his father.
Time and again, through this book, and through his other collections, essays and translations, Heaney responds to his world and the wider world with a voice that is singular; ordinary and subtle, modest and dauntingly serene - and always real.
