Interview: Seamus Heaney, poet

I'M IN a taxi with Seamus Heaney, driving along Sandymount Strand. I'm going to the airport. He's going to meet the next person seeking an audience with the Nobel Laureate. But, for the moment, we're driving through the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses.

We pass a Martello Tower. "This is where Stephen Dedalus walks into town," Heaney explains. "And here, Bloom watches the young Gerty MacDowell – and gets excited." He puts the slightest stress on that last word. There's a mischievous smile playing around his eyes. "A sculptor put up, well, a standing stone to mark the spot," he points. "I unveiled it, inaugurated it, whatever it is you do with a standing stone."

The taxi moves on. He points out where Samuel Beckett grew up. We talk about the demise of the Celtic Tiger. But the man with the laughing eyes is the Heaney I remember. He may hold most of the accolades known to literature and be feted with great solemnity at home and abroad, but he isn't above a bit of schoolboy humour.

That morning, he told me earlier, he had declined invitations to literary festivals in Melbourne and Venice. It makes you grateful that he accepted the one from the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews where he will take part in several events later this week. But he has his reasons. "The context in St Andrews is the context of people I know, it's a deep poetry audience, it's an old connection, it's a sustenance as much as a giving. There's a camaraderie there with all those people. If you go to a festival in Venice, you're an exhibit. You're doing interviews, there's going to be radio, photographers, interpreters, you don't know what you're saying. You're there to decorate the programme, you're a celebrity."

He says the word with a certain amount of distaste, but Heaney might be the closest the literary world has to a true celebrity. In Dublin, his broad features and thatch of white hair rarely go unrecognised. "Seamus Famous" quipped Clive James years ago, and it stuck. The first Irish Nobel Prizewinner since Yeats, he is a national treasure. His 70th birthday last April was marked by a cacophony of adulation.

Since the Nobel Prize for Literature came calling in 1995, Heaney has been at the top of everybody's guest list. Politicians, universities, charitable causes, everyone wants a piece of him. At first, there seemed a danger that formal duties would leave no time for writing poems but, incredibly, he managed to do that too, and polish off a translation of Beowulf which topped the bestseller charts and won the Whitbread Prize.

A minor stroke in August 2006 forced him to reconsider his position. Though he made a full recovery within a few months, he cancelled a year of commitments. Now he is much more selective. He doesn't have the energy he once had, he says. He also sounds more tentative, less of a booming, room-filling presence. He steadies his hands against one another when pouring tea. He grants fewer interviews.

But when I knock at the door of the tall brick house on Sandymount Strand, he couldn't be more gracious. Cajoling me through to the warm kitchen, he and his wife Marie set about me. "I'm thinking the poor girl hasn't had anything to eat." "Oh God! I'll put out some cold cuts."

When we sit down to the interview, he insists I take the best chair, explaining excitedly about its reclining mechanism. He is a warm, bright-eyed, engaging interviewee who seems almost apologetic that he doesn't have more to offer. The truth is he has been comprehensively interviewed in the last 15 years – the late Ian Hamilton called him "the most over-interviewed of all living poets" – and this is all the more true since the publication of Dennis O'Driscoll's award-winning book of interviews, Stepping Stones. He prefaces the older chestnuts with, "You've probably read this but…"

We talk about his new book of poems, Human Chain, due out in September, which touches on the stroke, an event he has rarely talked about. "The core poem in it for me is a poem called 'Miracle', which addresses the moment in the New Testament when the man sick with palsy is lowered through the roof and Christ heals him and forgives his sins and so on. But my poem is more about the people who carry him in.

"On the morning of my stroke, we were in Donegal, and there were a number of friends in the same guest house. I woke up with one leg paralysed. One of the sets of friends are medics and they helped us. I got taken care of very well by the services, but there was a great sense of companionship, as well as physical strength, the people who helped me down the stairs when I was on the stretcher. That sense of a human chain, of solidarities."

Further poems celebrate other human connections: love poems to Marie, poems about his late parents and his two new grand-daughters. The book includes a sequence based on Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, about Aeneas's journey into the underworld where he meets both the shade of his father and a gathering of souls yet to be born.

"He comes to the banks of the Lethe and there is this great crowd humming like bees, they're souls who're going to return to earth. So, not only did this appeal to me because it was about getting ready to go down, but we've also had our first grandchildren in the last two or three years, so it's about getting ready to come back in."

Heaney has a gift for collapsing the boundaries between the mythic and the everyday. Thus Aeneas's journey to the underworld becomes intertwined with his own journey to Belfast as a young man on the No 110 bus, going to buy his first copy of Virgil in a second-hand market. The old man who advises him which bus to get becomes Charon, the mythical ferryman.

While mortality has long been an awareness in his poems, he's far from preoccupied with it. Becoming a grandfather has been, he says, "a very enriching thing", which landed him in the happiest of conundrums. The book was all but finished with a poem to his first grand-daughter, but the arrival of a second child required parity. A new last poem had to be added, "A kite for Aibhn", which in turns looks back to the poem he wrote a generation ago for his sons, "A kite for Michael and Christopher".

I tell him that I was recently shown a photograph taken when he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Stirling University in 1990. He is standing with Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith and their wives, and Sorley Maclean, their arms round each other's shoulders, smiling, another human chain. His face creases into a smile. "My friend, Alasdair Macrae, who was on the faculty at the time, invited everyone for a bit of a party."

There is no doubting the depth of his sense of connection to these Scottish men of letters. The first thing he asks me when we meet is whether I have any news of Edwin Morgan, the last surviving writer of that generation. Then he begins to map out the points of contact: reading with Hugh MacDiarmid in Dublin in the 1960s; first meetings with MacCaig and Crichton Smith when he attended an earlier poetry festival in St Andrews in 1973; hosting a visit from George Mackay Brown (a rare privilege, from a man who preferred not to leave Orkney).

There is no doubt, too, that the connection was important. He uses the word "camaraderie" more than once. There was a kinship right from the start, he says, between the speech of Scotland and Northern Ireland. He grew up with Burns recitations and Jimmy Shand records, a "sense of at-homeness with that part of the other isle". "And the Jacobite position! In my part of the world, it wasn't the Enlightenment, it wasn't David Hume, it was Bonnie Prince Charlie!

"There was a sense of relationship (among the poets], a sense of access, fraternity if you like. When a poet says 'Och' instead of 'Oh dear' (here he apes a convincing Oxbridge accent], it domesticates the art in a different sort of way. Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. So to have established writers who could be your neighbours in terms of attitude, speech and so on, that's corroboration."

And Heaney may have felt in need of corroboration. The eldest of nine children, raised on a farm in County Derry, he showed no poetic inclinations at school. At Queen's University he began to write, but his important early work happened in the context of the writing group started by Philip Hobsbaum, where he worked alongside poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.

In these early works, the rhythms and landscape of Ireland collide with the verbal inventiveness of Ted Hughes and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But they remain rooted in his home, as they do still, a poetry of hearth and hand. He saw in Maclean and Crichton Smith the worn faces and tweed jackets of country folk. People who said "Och". He did not write like them, but they were walking, talking corroboration.

When his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published by Faber in 1967, interest in his work grew fast. In the early 1970s he moved with his young family to the Republic of Ireland, which has been his home ever since. He wrote little directly about the Troubles, though it informed much of his work, and was ambivalent about the way he came to be quoted by politicians brokering the ceasefire.

Meanwhile, there were more books, more accolades, professorships at Harvard and Oxford, a breadth and depth of acclaim both critical and popular: Heaney's books make up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the UK. People queued so enthusiastically for his lectures that they were described as "Heaneyboppers".

Yet he has always remained a gracious, unassuming recipient of admiration. He talks about his success in terms of good fortune, always conscious of how far he has come. Perhaps what is fortunate is that as a young man Heaney found the vocation for which he was supremely gifted, and was able to remain focused on that. He feels like that rarest of things: a man allowed to reach his fullest potential, who truly fits his space in the world.

But the difficult business of writing poetry does not change. Nobel Laureate or not, the writer must wait for the muse, without knowing when – or if – she will come. "I still don't know the ratio of will to impulse, gift to work. It never quite works for me if I start with will, there has to be something else. Eliot calls it 'the dark embryo'. I call it the bleeper going off. Just something – bing! Often, for me, it's a memory coming back.

"It's a matter of waiting. There's an interview with Martin Amis where he says that writers going to the Eastern bloc, if they were worried about being writers, wrote 'waiter' on their passports so that it could easily be changed. Certainly for poets I think 'writer' and 'waiter' are totally allied. That sense that the previous poem is your last poem is always there. That anxiety."

If there is comfort, it is in camaraderie, the knowledge that others were faithful to the ache, and that it was worth it. "He is not at all like me but when I read Czeslaw Milosz I feel like I want to write. I'm not writing like him, it's completely different, but it helps you believe in the job." From the man commonly held to be the greatest poet working in English today, these are humble and humbling words.

The taxi is purring outside the tall brick house, and Seamus Heaney is rummaging in a drawer. "I'm looking for a hat for myself," he says, confidentially. "A bit of a disguise." Digging one out, he pulls it down, almost to his eyebrows. The shape of his face is changed, the unmistakable white hair has vanished. With any luck, he might just blend in, another man in an overcoat, unburdened by celebrity.

&149 Seamus Heaney is at StAnza Poetry Festival, St Andrews, 17-21 March: Round Table Reading at 3:45pm on 18 March, followed by An Evening with Seamus Heaney at 8pm, at the Byre Theatre; Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Dennis O'Driscoll at 3:30pm on Friday 21 March at the Byre Theatre. For more information, see www.stanzapoetry.org