Seamus Heaney - Bogland

Bogland

Seamus Heaney has long had a fascination with boglands. For centuries, bogs have been places to hide or discard things, but the bog also serves as a receptacle and a repository for our past.

Mossbawn

While giving a reading at the Dublin Arts Festival in 1972, Seamus Heaney explains to the audience how the bog is part of the environment he was born into. He tells how the etymology of the place-name Mossbawn (his family's farm) would be interpreted differently by the two traditions in Northern Ireland. Introducing the poem "Bogland", he talks of the bog becoming symbolic of a consciousness that retains and observes.

Bogland

Aindreas Ó Gallchóir asks Seamus Heaney to read the poem "Bogland" from his collection "Door into the Dark" and then to explain his fascination with bogs.

"We Have No Prairies"

Speaking to Mike Murphy in 2000, Seamus Heaney recalls exactly when the phrase "we have no prairies" came to him and offered a way into the poem that became "Bogland". He explains how the bog poems in "North" came from his obsession with photographs of objects found in bogs and how he does not see them as political poems.

"What More Do You Want Than Four Very Good Poems?"

On "The Arts" programme in 1974, writer and presenter Eavan Boland suggests that Heaney is in danger of artistic repetition with the bog poems. A good-natured discussion ensues.

"...But In Russian, It Means God"

In this radio documentary presented by Seamus Heaney in 1975, the poet reflects on the rituals and ancient past of Irish bogs and the modern industrial harvesting of turf.

"In The Hill Head Moss"

Seamus Heaney was a contributor to John Quinn's documentary "Bog Homage". In this clip, he recalls his great-uncle standing up in a cart on the way to the bog, an image that fed into the poem "Tollund Man". Heaney believes there is an otherworldly quality to the bog. He also says that a short rhyme about a man on the bog was one of the first poems he ever heard.