Greenhills Girls Encountering Heaney

‘Between haystack and sunset sky,

Between oak tree and slated roof,

I had my existence, I was there,

Me in place and the place in me’ (Seamus Heaney, 2010)

Recently, all of the sixth-year English students in Our Lady’s College, Greenhills, made their way to Bellaghy in County Derry where they visited the highly acclaimed Seamus Heaney, Homeplace, an arts and literary centre dedicated to the life and work of the Nobel Laureate.

Located between Mossbawn and The Wood, Seamus Heaney’s two childhood homes, the centre is situated in the heart of the landscape that informs and inspires so much of the poet’s work.

As part of their visit, the girls listened to a lecture on the genesis of “A Constable Calls”. This is a poem inspired by the visit of an RUC constable to the Heaney farm to record the various crops being grown when the poet was a young boy. The poem captures the remembered fascination and fear felt by Heaney as a child on that occasion.

The visit has deepened the students’ understanding of the themes and concerns that preoccupy one of Ireland’s greatest writers. Heaney once wrote that while he could not think of a single case where poems had changed the world, “what they do is change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world”.

This trip certainly opened the girls’ eyes to the transformative potential of poetry to enable their examination of our deeply troubled world and challenge the taken for granted.