Roy Foster's "On Seamus Heaney"

Reading Roy Foster’s absorbing On Seamus Heaney (2020), I was pleased to see The New Yorker mentioned. Foster writes,

Nearly twenty years later, I read “At the Wellhead” in the New Yorker, tore it out, and pinned it to the noticeboard in my Oxford study; slightly yellowed but enduringly magical, it was still there when I moved out after another twenty-odd years.

The New Yorker published thirty-eight Heaney poems. Foster refers to at least ten of them: “Casualty” (April 2, 1979), “Crossings” (April 17, 1989), “Keeping Going” (October 12, 1992), “At the Wellhead” (March 28, 1994), “Tollund” (October 3, 1994), “The Sharping Stone” (October 23, 1995), “The Perch” (January 18, 1999), “Electric Light” (June 19 & 26, 2000),  “The Turnip-Snedder” (March 20, 2006), and “In the Attic” (February 9 & 16, 2009). Of these, my favorite is “The Perch” (“Perch on their water perch hung in the clear Bann River / Near the clay bank in alder dapple and waver”). Foster calls it “a short and perfect poem of microscopic observation.” He’s right.