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 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.