Seamus Heaney photographed at home shortly before the launch of his collection District and Circle. Photograph: Louis Quail/ In Pictures Ltd./ Corbis via Getty Images

The Poems of Seamus Heaney Author : Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O’Donoghue and Dr Rosie Lavan with Matthew Hollis ISBN-13 : 978-0571340385 Publisher : Faber & Faber Guideline Price : £40

The last poem Seamus Heaney completed appears towards the end of this magisterial book. It was commissioned by the National Gallery to celebrate its 150th anniversary. The final draft of the poem was delivered on August 20th, 2013, 10 days before Heaney died.

A response to a painting, Banks of a Canal by the Impressionist C, this poem is suffused with subtle cadences, soft vowel sounds, calm rhythms.

The sky in the poem is “not truly bright or overcast”, and it is here, in this in-between space, that Heaney manages what he did for more than 50 years – to find an undertone that holds much emotion, that controls the feeling and keeps it still, thus allowing the energy of a poem to emerge guardedly, and all the more powerfully for that.

Banks of the Canal is not, however, the last poem in the book. Near the very end, after most of the copious notes and footnotes, there are 25 poems that have been chosen by Heaney’s family from “the large number of unpublished poems in varying states of completeness dating from all stages of the author’s life”.

The last of these poems, Those Winter Evenings, written in the summer of 2013, shows Heaney at his plainest.

Twenty years earlier, in Fosterling, he wrote of himself “waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels.” In many of these late poems, he allowed the unmarve