Discourse with the great poet, from the Telegraph UK:

“‘The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.’

… Heaney is always saying something: it is just that his yearning for precision, his wariness of misrepresentation, means he is supremely careful how he says it.

As I leave, he is offering advice on where in Dublin to eat good mackerel, and asking, ‘Have you euros?’ while preparing to rummage in his pockets, just in case I have stumbled up without the currency to make it back to the city centre.

A generous poet, then, and most generous of all is his parting benediction: ‘Write whatever you like!'”