‘It has been a wonderful, deepening time’: Alice Lyons on being the first recipient of the Heaney-Milosz Residency

In an old Kraków apartment a framed Irish poem still hangs on the wall nearly 20 years after the death of the man who hung it there.

The man was the Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz; the framed poem is Mise Raifteirí, by Antoine Ó Raifteirí. The original Irish is accompanied by an English translation by Milosz’s fellow Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. Echoing Raifteirí’s take on the poet’s life in a handwritten dedication, Heaney describes Milosz as someone “who came tramping west by the light of their heart, and shone for us”.

The poem was discovered on the wall last month by Alice Lyons, who came tramping east as the first recipient of the Heaney-Milosz Residency. A joint project of the Heaney Estate, the Irish Embassy in Poland and the Kraków Festival Office, the six-week residency gave the Sligo-based poet return flights to Kraków, a stipend of €250 a week and accommodation in Milosz’s former home, which is now owned by the city.

The aim of the residency is to honour the close friendship between the two late poets while giving contemporary Irish artists time and space to work on new projects – and perhaps open new doors between two countries. For this, according to Lyons, the Krakow apartment is an ideal launch pad.

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“In one of his essays,” she says, “Heaney describes the connection between Irish and Polish poetry as a shared desire for the sacred and spiritual ‘lift-off’.”

These days, though some older beliefs are dwindling in both Poland and Ireland, the legacy remains of Catholic faith and culture as repositories of national identity in times of occupation and humiliation. So-called Catholic intellectual clubs thrived in Poland right into the communist era and the effects can still be seen in its big cities’ cultural life and high-end literary bookshops. For Lyons, Kraków is a place “where arts, culture and intellectual life are really valued, with no shame about it”.

Lyons is a regular visitor to – and a published author in – Poland. Her interest began nearly 40 years ago, when she developed an interest in weaving. At a craft summer school in Maine she met Polish teacher Barbara Falkowska, who told Lyons about the 1980s Solidarity campaign against communist rule and introduced her to Poland’s history and to its great writers, including Milosz.

A lifelong love affair began. In her beautiful 2009 film-poem The Polish Language, Lyons pays tribute to the country’s “sonorous consonant tongue”, the colour of a crushed cherry and beet.

“I was immediately hooked on this rich culture and now have a lot of connections here,” she says. “But it has been a wonderful, deepening time. I’ve never had a chance to spend this much time here.”

Alongside readings and exploring the city – its historic centre is a Unesco World Heritage site – Lyons used her time to research and work on a hybrid book of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction set in post-Stalinist 1960s Poland. “It’s a book about contemplative people interested in looking and nature and poetry,” she says.

She could be talking about Milosz and Heaney, united in their lifelong fascination with the land, the life it gives and the divisions it sows. For Milosz, who was born in 1911 into the impoverished landed Polish gentry in what is now Lithuania, those divisions first emerged when he was young. The beautiful landscape of his youth was also one of contested language and history. This continued to inspire Milosz long after he moved to Warsaw, where he survived the vicious Nazi occupation.

After a brief period as a diplomat for postwar communist Poland, he fled its rising Stalinist strictures for France and then the United States, where he found a decades-long refuge – and, he says, purgatory – as professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California at Berkeley.

Even on the Pacific coast the Lithuanian-Polish tensions of his youth – and subsequent hot and cold wars – remained with Milosz. His preoccupation with “acute national hatreds” chimed with a young Heaney who, as the Troubles flared, faced huge pressure to take sides.

The late poet’s son Chris Heaney says his father learned much from Polish poets such as Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert about how, as a writer, to navigate shifting ideological undercurrents.

“The situations in which they found themselves became a stress test for poetry itself: how do you respond?” he says.

From hunger strikes in Northern Ireland to the martial law of 1980s Poland, the interest in Northern Ireland and Polish poets from the 1960s to the 1980s was mutual, according to the Polish poet and critic Jerzy Jarniewicz.

“The only Irish poets translated at that time into Polish were the poets of the Troubles, poets from Northern Ireland,” he writes. “Similarly, the only Polish poets translated and discussed by Irish poets were poets of dissidence associated with the opposition to the communist rule.”

So what was the source of mutual attraction? In an essay, Heaney wrote that many poets in Northern Ireland admired the way their Polish contemporaries retained artistic and ethical integrity, given the challenges of how to “survive amphibiously, in the realm of ‘the times’ and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect”.

Though Heaney’s Polish-Northern Ireland parallels have drawn some criticism, the focus on maintaining artistic freedom – to engage with society without being captured or compromised – was a lifelong preoccupation of Milosz. His nonfiction book The Captive Mind, a critique, from 1953, of artist fellow traveller friends in the communist era, remains relevant today. Submitting to socialist realism, he wrote, “strengthens weak talents and undermines great ones”.

Writing later, he described his career and early life as resisting the “weight of fact” of the cataclysmic history he lived though. Even as a nonconforming Polish poet in exile, he knew the temptations – and pressures – to register moral protest.

Maintaining perspective without slipping into the realm of reportage, Milosz wrote at the age of 90, required “a cunning in selecting one’s means and a kind of distillation of material to achieve a distance to contemplate the things of this world as they are, without illusion”. Where Heaney dug for truth with his squat pen, Milosz wrote that “whatever I hold in my hand, a stylus, reed, quill or a ballpoint ... I attend to matters I have been charged with”.

The challenge of how to remain alert and relevant but disengaged remains today, in new debates such as identity politics, says Alice Lyons.

“Milosz is a great guide here in not attaching too much to the fads and fashions of any contemporary period in art and staying in possession of one’s self,” she says. “He had this unshakeable keel that steered him.”

Before Lyons left Kraków, at an evening in her honour, Ireland’s Ambassador to Poland, Patrick Haughey, described her as a “perfect choice” for the inaugural residency, to “honour the legacy of the Milosz-Heaney friendship and celebrate the strong and growing cultural ties between Ireland and Poland”.

Chris Heaney says his family is delighted to help support the residency, keeping alive his father’s affection for Poland with a programme open to “a range of artists, not just poets”. Seamus Heaney visited Kraków seven times. His son remembers one visit by Milosz – and his spectacular eyebrows – to the Heaney home, in the 1990s. “I just remember the excitement on Dad’s part,” he says. “Milosz was just very important to him.”

Applications for the next biennial residency, in 2025, will open next year; the residency is open to emerging or mid-career writers resident on the island of Ireland. For Marta Filipiuk-Michniewicz of the Kraków City of Literature programme, the residency is about “building a real, live relationship between artists from Ireland and Poland”. It can “result in more than just literary works”, she says.

“Such encounters also provide the impetus and space for collaborative projects created from the bottom up” – projects, she adds, that “often only have a chance to emerge through face-to-face meeting”.

For Alice Lyons the creative process is about “fumbling, feeling, groping, playing” and creating “conditions for radical stumbling”. Just as the number of ferries leaving Rosslare directly for France has leapt since Brexit, the Heaney-Milosz residency offers an artistic opportunity for radical stumbling as Ireland seeks out new, direct cultural paths back to continental Europe.