The rural landscape of Mid-Ulster will resonate again with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, a year after the death of the Nobel Laureate, at a festival next weekend to celebrate his life and work.
The four-day event, called On Home Ground, will take place in Laurel Villa guesthouse in Magherafelt, County Derry, and surrounding locations that inspired Heaney’s writing. It will include performances and readings by Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody, children’s authors Eoin Colfer and Oliver Jeffers, as well as emerging poets and musicians from the area. Heaney’s family, who still live in the area, will also be attending.
The first On Home Ground Festival took place last year. Heaney had been invited to be its patron and keynote speaker, but died just a few weeks before.
At this year’s festival, a portrait of Heaney by Irish artist Colin Davidson, unveiled two months before his death in 2013, will be on display in Laurel Villa along with his poems, while films about the poet will be shown in the stables. There will also be a poetry trail in the garden, with Heaney’s verses positioned next to plants referenced in his work, such as a rowan tree (“A rowan like a lipsticked girl”), bog oak (“A carter’s trophy split for rafters”) and mint (“It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles/Growing wild at the gable of the house”).
The festival has been organised by Eugene Kielt, owner of Laurel Villa, who has been running tours of Heaney country from his guesthouse since 1993. “I saw Seamus Heaney read for the first time in the 1970s – he was such a charismatic figure, a literary giant, and he was local, from just a few miles away in Castledawson, speaking a language I understood in a south Derry accent.
“The tours are a great way to show people the locality through the words of Heaney – there can be no better vehicle. He’s written about the area so beautifully and faithfully, and recorded a world, a lot of which has gone, but much of which remains.”
Kielt will be running a tour as part of the festival that takes in the roots and branches of Heaney’s art, from Mossbawn, where he was born, to Barney Devlin’s forge at Hillhead (“an altar/Where he expends himself in shape and music”), Church Island on the shores of Lough Beg, and Bellaghy, where he is buried. An interpretive centre in Bellaghy dedicated to Heaney’s manuscripts and artefacts is scheduled to open in 2015.
BBC Radio Ulster Arts presenter Marie-Louise Muir, who curated the festival, said that holding the event in Heaney country gives it a uniqueness that would be lost in a bigger venue like Belfast. “Heaney was always mindful of how he would be perceived and received in his own area. The connection with the area was critical for him. And there’s nobody that could describe it better – the dialect, the sounds, the smells come through in his writing.”
Those wanting to “taste” his poetry can also eat Heaney-themed food at the festival – “laying down a perfect memory/In the cool thatch and crockery” – from blackberries (“a glossy purple clot”) to oysters (“Our shells clacked on the plates/my tongue was a filling estuary”). But thankfully there will be no “jampotfuls of the jellied specks” of frogspawn described in the Death of a Naturalist.
• On Home Ground Celebrating Seamus Heaney, 11-14 September, onhomegroundfestival.com, 028-7126 6946. Some events are free, others cost £5 to £10
