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"Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us: Maneuverings to find out name and school, Subtle discrimination by addresses With hardly an exception to the rule ... Is there a life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and sup, We hug our little destiny again." Following his Nobel win, Heaney spoke as a guest lecturer at universities worldwide and frequently conducted public readings, at which he excelled with his resonant baritone voice. But he scaled back public commitments following a 2006 stroke that left him feeling, as he described it in a 2009 interview, feeling "babyish." "I cried. And I wanted my daddy," he recalled. Heaney said he felt, as a young Catholic man in a Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, initially excited by the 1970 rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, an outlawed group that used death and destruction to tear down the province's Protestant government but failed to end Northern Ireland's union with Britain. He soon identified the IRA's tit-for-tat bloodshed with police, soldiers and Protestant militants as a pointless waste that numbed the community's senses. "There was a sense of an utterly wasteful, cancerous stalemate, and that the violence was unproductive. It was villainous, but you were living with it. Only after it stopped did you realize what you had lived with. Day by day, week by week, we lived through this, and didn't fully take in what was going on," he said in 2009. Heaney's approaching mortality was evident at one of his final public appearances this month at an event celebrating Yeats, when he initially started to quote a poem from what he called "my last book" -- then, with a wry chuckle, switched his words to "my latest collection." He declined to sign books in a sign of his fading energy. Heaney is survived by his wife, Marie, and children Christopher, Michael and Catherine. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
[Associated
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