‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’. What he most enjoyed in Queensland was a drive through the country – ‘red earth and white-barked gum trees’ – to the town of Nambour, close to where his Uncle Charlie (his father’s twin brother) had lived in the 1920s. Heaney’s letters are a vivid interweaving of travelogue, literary allusion, poetic imagery, and personal history. Sharing pleasure in the power of words is fundamental, even when letter writing becomes a thing of duty, rather than beauty, and the unanswered mail piles up around him.

One of the peculiar formal characteristics of letters, especially the letters of poets, is that they have a capacity to be intimately confiding and, at the same time, hopeful of a future readership. In Heaney’s case, the keynote is not so much posterity as belatedness. Dozens of letters open with a familiar apology – ‘Forgive me for not writing earlier’ – and he repeatedly derides himself as ‘a man of letters’ who doesn’t deserve the title, not having written any in a long time. He routinely undoes his claims to poetic immortality, at one point depicting himself (not without poetic flair) as ‘a frazzled, frizzled item, a worn-out Triton, a punctured Michelin man, a posthumous Paddy, a waft of aftermath’.