Though Heaney’s prosody usually featured rhymes, rhythms and line lengths that emulated human speech fitted to traditional poetic forms, it was still insistently contemporary in attitude. Like a true original he uniquely transformed the fourteen-line sonnet, originally identified with courtly love, to speak of family in a way that enabled him to control his emotional timbre, avoid noxious sentimentality and give the reader a place in the poem. In particular, the wonderful eight sonnet sequence, “Clearances,” written in memory of his mother, appears to fit the occasion now, as it did then, of coming to grips with the passing of one who meant so much, even as it difficult to explain to someone outside poetry how this intimate relationship could be so ‘personal’ given the distances between each of us.