Canopy

From the late 1970’s Seamus Heaney enjoyed a long relationship with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, initially as a guest lecturer. His regular presence enabled him to share the cultural calendar of America’s oldest established Ivy League university including a visual arts installation dating from May 1994. Its launch coincided with the spring-is-in-the-air suggestiveness of the most famous of the English madrigals, by Thomas Morley published in 1595 (Now is the Month of Maying). The installation lent a forest tree-top effect to Harvard Yard with added sights and sounds. In Heaney’s imagination it triggered something much more otherworldly. Spring was in the air (young green) and with it a hush of anticipation (whispering everywhere). An English visual artist had […]