"Digging" by Seamus Heaney (1966)

In this opening poem from Death of a Naturalist, Heaney recalls with admiration his father and grandfather’s skill at using a spade to break up the soil for planting. The poem shifts from present to past and back again, with Heaney finally acknowledging that his tool is one of communication, though he will use it as if performing manual labor.

"Antarctica" by Derek Mahon (1990)

A Belfast contemporary of Heaney’s, Derek Mahon was similarly attracted to emotional understatement and formal patterns such as this villanelle about the death of the explorer Captain Oates.

"The Burdens" by Stephen Sexton (2019)

Belfast poet Stephen Sexton has been hailed as the heir to Heaney after his recent collection If All the World and Love Were Young won the Forward Prize. In this poem, Sexton uses the frame of Super Mario World to write about childhood memories around his mother’s death from cancer.

"To Set the Darkness Echoing" by Dennis O’Driscoll (2006)

A fascinating conversation between Heaney and O’Driscoll, another of Ireland’s foremost poets. Heaney reveals the surprising fact that at school he had “a reputation for being good at sums” rather than language, and the early importance of writing an essay about a day out at the seaside.