It is not of many poets that I can say I remember reading their work at school - in the sense of actually being in the act of reading, the place, the room, the moment, the poem Mid-term Break - and Heaney has stayed with me through good times, through the tragic loss of my partner the poet Leslie Reid, through politics, through times I studied with David Citino in the Columbus, in Galicia, in the Borders waiting for District and Circle - my first hardback poetry book bought new, (the first book I bought a battered second hand paperback Field Work in Blackwells after agonising over the cost and the wisdom of the purchase), and if not in conclusion, the poem Sunlight - the first part of two Mossbawn poems dedicated to his mother - read by my sister Deirdre - which finishes with these lines:
And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
More here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10275832/Seamus-Heaney-poet-dies-aged-74.html
