Heaney's Islands: Landscape, Memory and Imagination
'We are bombarded by the empty air.'
Join us on Saturday 21st November at 2pm as we welcome back Lesley Bond to the Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition for a talk exploring Seamus Heaney's relationship with islands as places of both landscape and imagination. Structured around three themes, we will consider Heaney's engagement with Ireland's offshore islands, the 'islands' of the landscape found in his bog poems, and the islands of the mind that emerge in his later, more reflective work.
Moving between poetry, place, and cultural memory, Lesley Bond offers a way of tracing how islands function throughout Heaney's writing as spaces of attention, transformation, and creative renewal.
Lesley Bond is a writer and heritage researcher with a particular interest in landscape and intangible cultural heritage. She holds a master’s degree in Public History from Trinity College Dublin and has developed and delivered heritage programmes with national cultural institutions. She has also previously worked in the National Library of Ireland's Seamus Heaney exhibition Listen Now Again. In 2019, she spent six months as caretaker of the Great Blasket Island. Her first book, Blasket Bound, was published by Gill Books in 2026.
