You'll have a lump in your throat: BBC Radio 4's Four Sides of Seamus Heaney reviewed

It’s now been ten years since Seamus Heaney died, and after a great poet’s death it’s natural, I suppose, that the keg of popular imagination works to distil a lifetime’s writing into a kind of Greatest Hits. His poems ‘Digging’, ‘Blackberry Picking’, ‘Mid-Term Break’ and the masterly sonnet sequence about his mother in ‘Clearances’ sit among the justifiable contenders, but even so there can be concentrations too far. A US presidential speech on any given topic is now unlikely to conclude, it seems, without Joe Biden mistily inserting the lines that Heaney wrote for the chorus in his Sophocles adaptation The Cure At Troy. You’ll recognise them: they’re the ones that end ‘The longed for tidal wave/ Of justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme’.

Heaney was never a flâneur, or posing as one: when it came to poetry, he put his back into it

It came as a relief, therefore, to listen to Radio 4’s excellent Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, and be reminded of the broad range and artful precision of his work: its long roots in rural Derry’s landscape and language, the ache of Northern Ireland’s violent quarrels, and his love of family and friends.