A reading of seven poems from Seamus Heaney's fourth collection, North (1975):

Following the poems is a reading from interviews Heaney gave on the writing of North, taken from Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. This time around, the interviews are prefaced by a more historical introduction to the bog bodies that figure in the poems from North. The books mentioned and read from in this section are P. V. Glob's The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, Wijnand Van Der Sanden's Through Nature to Eternity: The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe, Timothy Taylor's The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death, Miranda Aldhouse-Green's Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe's Ancient Mystery.

The first five of Heaney's collections can be purchased here, and a good selection from the first half of his career can be found in Selected Poems 1966-1987.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at [email protected], and I will remove the episode immediately.