Walcott & Heaney

By all accounts, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney are good mates. They have both won the Nobel Prize. They both had collections in the running for the 2010 T S Eliot prize. Walcott took it (Heaney had already won the Forward Prize). Both in their 70s, I've noticed one distinct difference: Walcott's White Egrets, to me, has stonger roots in the present - while mourning lost friends he also hails new and younger ones. The present looks to a future, in his own death. Heaney, on the other hand, in Human Chain, while writing poems in the present, to me seems to look more distinctly to the past - as in the lovely poem about the Conway Stewart fountain pen. Maybe just an impression ...