'Every so often you know you've seen something extraordinary,' festival director Rosemary Sayer told a hushed full house at the University of Hong Kong on Monday as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney stepped down from the stage.
Heaney clearly relished delivering the opening lecture of the 2006 Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He read selected works with personal commentary ranging from the first poem of his first collection to the last of his latest volume - 'as promised in the programme', he pointed out in a deep Irish brogue. 'I like to deliver what is promised.'
Of his art, Heaney said: 'A lyric poet is a strange creature. What creates the poetry can be very secret and odd, yet there is some need to link it to the common world.' There was no beginners' class for poets, he said. 'Once you allow yourself to be called a poet, you're in there with Horace and Ted Hughes and Homer.'
Between sometimes poignant recollections of Northern Ireland, where he grew up 'fostered alike by beauty and fear', the poet toyed with his audience. Falling behind schedule, he promised: 'I will let you out on time at six-thirty. We may only be halfway through, but we will magically hurry up.' To the delight of everyone present, he didn't.
Although the organisers billed Heaney's reading as the festival's opening event, one author and former Hong Kong politician had different ideas. Libby Wong was back in town to promote her new novel and, ever the canny operator, her literary lunch at the Foreign Correspondents' Club para-chuted into the programme ahead of Heaney's lecture. 'It's just the way things turned out,' the festival organisers said. Well, perhaps.
Wong's novel Rainbow City took five years and 26 drafts to write. 'When friends asked what I was doing and I told them 'writing a novel', they said, 'Ah, so you're out of a job',' she joked.
