It's still my favorite Seamus Heaney book.
I met him at a reading. Boston College,
April of '85. I was fifteen.

I shook his hand and blurted, "I try to write!"
"Oh, we all try to write, don't we? Probably
hard to make time for it, with your studies."

Kind and indulgent toward a teenager
too callow to be awestruck. I blame his ghost
for planting in my addled pate the notion

that a poet's rarely sober. His "Elegy"
(to Robert Lowell) reads: You drank America
like the heart's iron vodka. Lowell's image

(I'd later learn) translating Pasternak.
Wild, radical, better than the movies.