THIS survey of the life and work of the late Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s national poet and Nobel Laureate, was published in the month of John Hume’s death — another Nobel Prize winner and a schoolmate of Heaney’s —  and the book gives a timely perspective on the Northern Irish Troubles as experienced and responded to in Heaney’s work.

Its author, historian RF Foster, charts Heaney’s developing awareness of the need to create form out of [[{"fid":"24240","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]the chaos of atrocity, not only in his writing but in his choices of allegiance and he chooses, beyond any cause, the independence of the artist in following the dictates of his art form.

In doing so, Heaney cultivated subtlety, tact and discipline during a pressurised period. But he wielded his capacity for “lacerating insights,” digging down and confessing to self-serving denials.

His reparative poem to his assassinated second cousin, Colum McCartney, from the collection Station Island, has the murder victim accuse the poet also of the wrong against him: “You confused evasion and artistic tact.”

In this refusal to shuck off responsibility, Heaney, similarly to Hume, offered a form in which thought might take up the place of hatred.

Foster has had access to much of Heaney’s unpublished material and private notes. He shows many of the “visions and revisions”  — to quote TS Eliot — that reveal Heaney’s careful progress but also his humanity.

He documents too Heaney’s lively engagements with his forbears — Eliot, who held that poetry is a necromantic discipline — WB Yeats and plenty more, from classical to contemporary masters of form who animated Heaney’s imagination and intellect.

But there are no women. To quote Irish writer Mary O’Donnell, responding to the recent Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, “this represents a startling inventory of omission.”

But Heaney himself nailed his colours to the obligation of poetry to redress any “one-eyed” vision and it was, Foster demonstrates, rejected by Heaney in sectarian politics.

Yet the attempt to pass over the masculine hogging of the canon in Irish poetry does not provide any legacy from the poet for facing this current gender issue.

The book is richly seamed with quotations that bring Heaney’s voice close and Foster handles the physical decline of the poet, leading to his last words for his wife Marie: “noli timere,”  — don’t be afraid” — such that the pathos of a man’s life resonates to “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”    

Published by Princeton University Press, £14.99.