Heaney parody: satirical or just snarky?

Seamus Heaney's Human Chain has received nothing but accolades—until now.  Satirical magazine Private Eye published a parody of the poet's work that straddles the line between tactful and tasteless.

The Belfast Telegraph explains:

Included on its literary pages is a series of poems attacking Heaney’s style, subject matter and values — even resorting to pejorative references to his religion.

The sneering title An Irish Poet Foresees His Destiny is a direct reference to An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by WB Yeats, an analogy which seems slightly tasteless given the fact that death, loss and Heaney’s own recent brush with mortality form the subject matter and theme of Human Chain.

With the emphasis on his Catholic roots and Irishness, critics weigh in on whether this is merely "jaunty ribbing" or a "thinly veiled sectarian rant:"

Cultural commentator and poet Theo Dorgan, the former director of Poetry Ireland, went further: “There’s a Private Eye tradition. They do two things —take on someone grandly inflated or look at whose turn has come among the great and good. Nobody takes it too seriously, but here there’s a nasty undercurrent.”

He added: “As parodies, these are sadly illiterate and full of tired sectarian hand-me-down phrases. They reflect extraordinarily poorly on the author and tell us nothing about Heaney’s work — which is surely the point of good parody — but simply prove our dark suspicion that there is still a well of prejudice to be drained. Sad, sad, sad.”