One of the worst possible inevitable things has happened. We’ve lost a towering talent and one of the great moral centers of the twentieth century.

Because he was a poet loved by almost every human who loved poetry, watching people who may care very little about poetry hear the news and find a remembered snippet is the sweetest of tributes:

A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for.

…

The cool that came off the sheets just off the line / Made me think the damp must still be in them

…

Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

…

Trove of the turfcutters’ / Honeycombed workings. / Now his stained face / Reposes at Aarhus.

…

Here is an interview he did with the Paris Review. Here is a lovely piece that our own Daisy Parente wrote about watching Heaney read. I too got to briefly share a room with Heaney, and will never forget it, or him, or his perfect, perfect books.

Of the latter, please buy Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. And Beowulf.

We don’t have a lot of Seamus Heaneys left to us.