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Galway City Poetry Trail - Salthill Promenade

Galway
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At Cúirt 2006, a poem titled “Girls bathing at Salthill” was unveiled on Salthill Promenade. It was written by Seamus Heaney when he and his wife were on honeymoon in Galway, and it is located on the Promenade facing the ‘Ladies’ bathing area. It was unveiled by the poet himself and John Mulholland, who was the assistant Mayor at the time. “Among schoolchildren as well as many a writer and poetry fan, Heaney, smiling public man, spoke and read and twinkled”. Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, where his family engaged in farming and selling cattle. His education included studies at Queen's University in Belfast, where he also served as a lecturer at the end of the 1960s. He made his debut as a poet then, but continued to divide his time between his own writing and academia. He worked at Carysfort College in Dublin, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at Oxford University. Seamus Heaney was married and had three children. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".