North at 50: Thursday 5th June-Saturday 7th June 2025
The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's

When North arrived in June 1975, Seamus Heaney’s fourth collection of poetry was met with almost immediate acclaim. In the United States, Robert Lowell claimed that the collection represented ‘a new kind of political poetry by the best Irish poet since W. B. Yeats’, and Helen Vendler described Heaney as ‘the best poet now writing in Ireland’. In Britain, Blake Morrison described North as achieving ‘the kind of acclaim which… we had ceased to believe poetry could receive’. The collection won several awards, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W.H. Smith Memorial Prize, the Poetry Book Society choice, and it was a major contribution towards Heaney’s selection as Nobel Laureate for Literature two decades later.

Described in later life by its author as ‘The book of mine that came most intensely out of the first shock of the Troubles’, North also took what Heaney called a ‘hammering’ closer to home, for its representation of violence, its gender politics, and even what Conor Cruise O’Brien called its ‘bleak conclusiveness’. Despite this, poems from North continue to be collected, anthologized, and studied to this day, and the collection as a whole remains integral to an understanding and appreciation of Heaney and contemporary poetry.

This conference aims to reflect on the moment of North, inviting responses from poets, academics, writers, artists, and those working in any field related to or adjacent to poetry. Suggested topics for papers and panels include but are not limited to:

Teaching North at school and in universities | Reception of North | Forms of North | North and intertextuality | The material contexts of its publication and collection | North in the overall context of Heaney’s career | The Ethics of North | North and gender Politics | Precursors to North | The afterlives of the text