09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Martina Devlin: Forgotten Seamus Heaney poem is a reminder of the power of art in public spaces
The Nobel laureate wrote two poems for the Poems on the Dart project, but only one of them has been published so far
'People say there's no money in poetry. I say there's no poetry in money,' literary agent Jonathan Williams said. For 25 years, he ran an imaginative initiative publishing poetry inside Dart train carriages. Commuters were able to read original and classic poems by a wide variety of poets – living and dead, female and male, in Irish and English.
Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney was among poets who gave new work to Poems on the Dart. In fact, he handed over two short poems. One was Dublin 4, a rare, poetic engagement with Dublin, where the farmer's son spent much of his life. Rural settings are more common in the work of Heaney, who was born in Bellaghy, Co Derry.
