As we learn in “Clearances” Heaney’s relationship with his mother, like so many other mother-son bonds, was complicated. He clearly loved his mother and cherished the time he spent with her. However, his inner life was ill-suited to hers, for she patently lacked the education and cultivation to share the material aspects of Heaney’s professional calling or grasp the matters he wrestled with in his adult life. She could not be there for him in this most important area of his life. In “Clearances” he tries to make sense of this conflict; to understand the yearning for the poignant silences that became his most enduring memory of being in her presence and to find peace in that longing for the spiritual and psychological space that became necessary for him to gain.