When Faber & Faber announced in June they were offering TS Eliot's The Waste Land as an iPad app, a lot of us Luddites snorted and rolled our eyes to heaven, and said, "My dear, what would poor Tom Stearns have made of this?" But we agreed that, if you really couldn't get to grips with the actual words of the Modernist masterpiece, the app certainly offered you a lot for £7.99 – recordings of the poem being read by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortensen and TSE himself (sounding like a depressed bank manager throughout); a dramatised, intensely physical reading by Fiona Shaw; and hyperlinked commentaries from 30-odd literary chaps from Seamus Heaney to Craig Raine.

A new collection of essays by Karl Miller is a cause for jubilation, and this one comes with a bonus: a 31-page preface, or companion piece, by Andrew O'Hagan. O'Hagan's foreword, "The Excursions", sets the scene for much of what's in store. It describes a series of literary jaunts, undertaken in a spirit of homage and exuberance, by three friends, distinguished fellow-Celts, all endowed with the strongest instinct for allusion and assessment. ("Karl and Seamus sat on a bench and argued about the Latin on Vaughan's grave.")

Typically, beautifully, the 12-line title poem of a volume that embodies Heaney's return from illness begins with a "close-up" of aid workers on TV swinging "bags of meal" one to another as soldiers fire.

So, in 1983, I was 12, and my parents took me to see an actor who had been in 'Star Wars', performing in York Theatre Royal. I felt a little self-conscious as the lights went down, a harpist plucked out a strange tune, and then a single man, in fur and cloak, appeared under a lone spotlight. "Hear," he said, "Listen!" So Julian Glover began his rendition of 'Beowulf'.

"As an artist, he has gone his own way, explored the Irish landscape and enhanced Irish landscape painting through the discovery andelaboration of an individual style," Seamus Heaney wrote in 1995 in a tribute to his friend TP Flanagan. The occasion was a major retrospective of Flanagan's work at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, in which the full range and distinctiveness of the artist's accomplishments were acknowledged and applauded. Atmospheric, elegant and enchanting, the works on show were an endorsement of Flanagan's high standing among Irish artists of the 20th century.

A couple of years ago, I heard Derek Walcott speak at the St Lucia high commission in London to an audience largely made up of his fellow-islanders. As always, he insisted that pride in a place and a home should always combine with a keen embrace of the best the wide world of culture has to offer. "Art is as necessary as sewage," he said.

"They've killed the show", moaned Melvyn Bragg when ITV brought down the kibosh on the arts programme that had become a revered institution over its 32-year (and 110-award) lifespan.

This novelisation of a year in the young life of the poet John Clare is a testament to a lifetime's groundbreaking commitment to folk culture. A renowned folk performer, but a first-time novelist, Hugh Lupton is neither a prose stylist, nor a formal innovator of fiction. But he is a master in two areas: storytelling and English rural folk culture. Lupton knows Clare and his village of Helpston, Northamptonshire, as well as anyone, and reconstructs Clare's times with a rare conviction. The context, landscape, language and texture of Clare's life and landscape are re-imagined in enchanting and accurate detail.

The Forward prizes anthology turns in its annual magic trick. Within a few hours of delight and surprise, it makes readers who have backslid on attention to new verse feel in the loop, and up to speed.

This is a magnificent anthology. Its size alone (over 1000 pages) would make it outstanding, but more to the point is its scope and adventurousness. It achieves what might seem nearly impossible, a balanced view of Irish poetry from the earliest times to the present. It does a great job of sorting out the unsurpassable from the merely passable. It's undaunted by the magnitude of the undertaking. Of course, like all editors of anthologies, Patrick Crotty isn't without a quirk or two, or an idee fixe of his own. These are most apparent, perhaps, when it comes to contemporary poetry and the vexed question of who's in and who isn't. As Crotty acknowledges in his sterling introduction, it's inevitable that "eyebrows will be raised" over this or that choice. I would have dropped some and added others; but every reader, naturally, will have his or her own opinion.

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Forward Poetry Prize last night, having been a runner-up on two previous occasions.