At a Seamus Heaney reading, the listeners hear poetry that's not confined to the rhyme and meter of a specific poem.

They also hear the echoes of thousands of years of poets, from the Greeks to the modern-day, in the melodic lilt of Heaney's brogue and the clarity of his insight.

He offered it all last night to a crowded auditorium at Carlow College in an International Poetry Forum program held in conjunction with the school.

In that vein, Heaney opened his reading with a memorial to Patricia Dobler, poet and director of Carlow's new graduate writing program, who died this year.

Heaney, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps Ireland's greatest bard since William Butler Yeats, and, like Yeats, his poetry celebrates the people, culture and landscape of that troubled island.

One of his first selections was the well-known "Digging," a tribute to two generations of Heaney men who turned the Irish soil for potatoes and peat: "By God, the old man could handle a spade, just like his old man," he writes of his father and grandfather. But for the third generation, the tool is a pen:

"Between my finger and my thumb,
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it."

Much of the evening was taken up with digressions on the literature of the British Isles -- Scottish, English as well as Irish -- with a dig at the Welsh, a "people deserved to be conquered."

Heaney has taught as well as written, and he offered a quick course on how the sounds of the English language evolved from the back and forth rhythms of Anglo-Saxons rowing the North Sea and the tap-tap-tap of Celts pounding metal at their forges.

Another occupation, farming, also was part of Heaney's tribute to the rural nature of his homeland, as he read a work by Patrick Cavanaugh, a "farmer poet."

"The Troubles" did not go without powerful mention in such poems as "A Constable Calls" to a eulogy for a cousin killed in an ambush. Two loving sonnets about his mother grounded in peeling potatoes and folding sheets rose to emotional heights. Heaney also offered a memorial to the victims of Sept. 11th: "A Father's Lament," from his translation of "Beowulf."