​Blackberry Picking

​"For a full week, the blackberries would ripen."

"We trekked and picked until the cans were full .... "

Seamus Heaney explores childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, hope and disappointment, pleasure and pain. There is an element of "Carpe Diem" here - it is not worth storing the blackberries!

The model in the painting is Eva my granddaughter while still at primary school and she is searching for blackberries along the river Lagan in Belfast. "It isn't fair" is frequent refrain of Eva's.

Blackberry picking appeared in Heaney's first book Death of a Naturalist in 1966 and was published by Faber and Faber.