HEANEY, Seamus. Keeping Going. Illustrations by Dimitri Hadzi (Signed by Heaney, Hadzi & Lee)

New Hampshire: William B. Ewert, 1993. Limited Edition. Quarto, unpaginated. A fine copy in the publisher's grey wraps. This is number 58 of 250 limited copies SIGNED by Heaney, Dimitri Hadzi (the illustrator), and Gino Lee (the printer), and one of just 150 copies in this binding. Notably scarce among Heaney's private press volumes.

“Keeping Going” is Seamus Heaney’s lucid hymn to endurance and moral steadiness, addressed to his older brother Hugh and set against the ordinary rhythms of farm life in County Derry. The poem weighs the small, sustaining rituals—whitewashing walls, handling the churn, keeping the yard in order—against the background pressure of the Troubles, where language, loyalties and daily labour are tested. Heaney’s idiom is tactile and exact: tools, lime, rain, cattle and butterfat become emblems of an ethic of care. The poem’s music moves from intimate address to meditative authority, its cadences measuring the distance between art and action, town and country, fear and fortitude.

Rather than glorifying resilience, Heaney honours a kind of homely fidelity: a person who “keeps going” by doing the next necessary thing, refusing spectacle and bitterness. The poem’s moral centre lies in attention—how to see truly, to name accurately, and to place oneself rightly among neighbours and histories. In that sense “Keeping Going” clarifies Heaney’s lifelong argument that poetry can steady the spirit without pretending to solve politics.

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