It has been another triumphant few days for Seamus Heaney, Nobel prizewinner and Ireland’s most revered poet.

The Bellaghy man capped a successful recovery from a serious stroke in 2006 by last week winning the Forward Prize for his first collection since his illness from Faber & Faber.

Human Chain, Heaney’s 12th book of poems, was described by the judges of the £10,000 prize as “a collection of painful, honest and delicately weighted poems” and a “wonderful and humane achievement”.

Such accolades follow the glowing reviews the collection received upon publication last month.

But a rather different appreciation of the Nobel Laureate’s work appears in the current edition of satirical magazine, Private Eye.

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.

As a poet from the Catholic community who came to global prominence during the period of the Troubles, Heaney’s relationship with Catholicism itself, his Irishness and other communities on the island played a significant role in his imagination and in how his work was received abroad. In this context, the appearance of the word “Fenian” in one of the verses in Private Eye is unsettling, to say the least, particularly when Heaney’s fellow writers — the poet Paul Muldoon and novelist Colm Toibin and “the others” — are described as “the Catholic band of brothers”.

The astonishing implication is that Heaney’s rise to prominence was fuelled and sustained by a cadre of Irish, Catholic intellectuals wielding undue influence in London, especially in publishing house Faber & Faber: “Lined up in the Guardian Review ... To offer their benedictions.”

Knockabout stereotypes of Irishness — “poor Paidraig (sic)”, “Father O’Hoolahan” — join what appear to be in-jokes in an extraordinary and unique assault on Heaney’s writing, his career, and on the poet himself: “I write poems — it’s a living, of sorts”.

Jaunty ribbing? Or thinly veiled sectarian rant? Affectionate mimicry? Or twisted jealousy? Bubbly skit? Or dark, rather seedy, malevolence?

Of course, the answer to those questions lies in who actually wrote the piece. But it appears anonymously, which has only led to speculation as to the identity of the author or authors.

You could shrug it off as envy-motivated schoolboy or schoolgirl humour and it is worth noting that Famous Seamus, as he’s known, sells much better than other Irish poets who work hard to shift a few hundred volumes.

However, some people might consider this sectarian take on the Irishman who may have said nobody in his house stood for the National Anthem but who was pleased to welcome the Queen to Queen’s University, Belfast, as unnecessarily savage and mischievous.

As Northern Irish poet Adrian Rice pointed out: “Folk who write this stuff are so green with envy, it's not funny.”

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.”

Novelist and critic Glenn Patterson, who teaches in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, said: "Beyond the gratuitousness of ‘Catholic band of brothers’, it's the tiredness of the whole thing that strikes me. In tone and content ‘An Irish Poet Foresees his Destiny’ in particular calls to mind the nineteenth century anti-Irish Punch cartoons. It says more about the state of British satire than the state of Irish poetry. And, boy, do they ever resent us: that line ‘your subjects ready-made’, as though somehow it’s easier for poets here. It isn’t. There just happens to be a disproportionately large number of very good ones, and a handful of very great ones, of whom Seamus Heaney is one."

Could it be that Heaney’s new autobiographical openness and willingness to confront some of the events that have shaped the life of this 71-year-old writer and teacher have somehow made him fair game? As if his invitation into his life has permitted this graffiti?

Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate thought he knew why the unnamed parodist did it. As a paid job. He said: “I think it’s knocking to order. Every week Private Eye print knocking reviews and in their Literary Review section, and it’s part of their usual fun.”

Whatever the motive, the anonymity seems a tad cowardly. So who wrote this attack on Heaney? Was it a local poet bitter enough to imagine a Catholic clique working to preserve Heaney at the top? Or was the parody the work of an English poet or critic, taking all of Irish poetry in the blast, who could not conceive of any other reason Irish poetry would thrive than that a Murphia would be peddling it in London?

Belfast poet and tutor Medbh McGuckian relished the parodies and has thoughts on the authorship. “In a way, it’s in the good old tradition of satire. Poets used to write squibs about each other and enjoy it.I think Seamus should retaliate.

“The Ballybunion section is about Heaney’s friendship with Bill Clinton, as they hang out when Clinton plays golf there. This is clearly someone who is well-informed and possibly close. Then the otter’s head section contains a reference to the myth of Orpheus so it’s by someone who is well versed and well read.

“But maybe they haven’t won anything recently.”

Yet playing literary Sherlock Holmes, a different clue is in the ghastly Oirishry. Surely no Irish poet or critic would put the repeated lines about a “grand auld life” in Heaney’s mouth, and expect to be trusted to have got the tone right?

Although Private Eye’s editor Ian Hislop was unavailable for comment because of TV filming, he has previously said that “satire should mock the strong” and is known to approve of the strong tradition of it in Britain, which in his view “aids freedom and democracy”.

Yet is this kind of anti-Irish Catholic attack the sort of Augean stable cleansing he actually had in mind?

As noted Belfast poet Martin Mooney said: “Well, the first rule of parody is know your subject/target: whoever did this knows neither Heaney nor Yeats. Bad free verse, cod-Oirishisms verging on the racist, the self-congratulation we're meant to blame really just rebounds on the (so- called) parodist.”

So the anonymous writer of the Heaney parody in Private Eye, perhaps thinking that he or she was leading a charge against Heaney and an incestuous Catholic Irish poetry clique, has won no admirers for the case against Heaney or the style of its delivery.

Canvassing views, there was an understandable desire in certain quarters to remain above the fray. Real literature and open mockery make fairly uneasy bedfellows, with notable 18th Century exceptions such as Pope and Swift.

Still, the timing of the attack seems slightly off. His recent stroke forced Heaney, a robust mid-Ulsterman brought up among farmers, to confront his mortality shortly before Human Chain appeared, and it includes moving poems such as Miracle, drawing parallels between the man carried by his friends to see Christ for healing and himself being lifted and laid at home as he was too weak to climb stairs.

Chanson d’Aventure contains this pure observation of the moment he and his wife held hands as they journeyed by ambulance to the hospital where he would receive treatment.

“Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift

And lag in yours throughout that journey

When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull.”

In a positive review for The Guardian, fellow Irishman Colm Toibin noted the texture of the simple lines: “(Heaney) invokes with gentle reverence John Keats, who wrote in a late poem of ‘This living hand, now warm and capable/of earnest grasping’”. Asked how he felt at being counted one of the pro-Heaney Catholic band, he said wryly: “I had forgotten I was a Catholic until Private Eye reminded me. I suppose it is a sort of crime, especially nowadays.”

Paul Muldoon, also in “the Catholic band of brothers”, reacted with a certain insouciance, saying “Looks like good clean fun to me”.

So, is all this simple anti-Irish prejudice? The anonymous parody sees the Irish poet as a sort of wide boy, selling blarney to the impressionable Brits.

“A grand auld life it is, to be sure? Being an Irish poet.”

This is patronising stuff. But if the writer thought he or she was bravely sticking it into a poet so loved that no one else would step forward and challenge his reputation, many Irish poets felt the parody was flat and glib and claimed that Irish poets and critics have done a better job themselves of unpicking Heaney.

Sinead Morrissey, a runner- up for the Forward against Heaney described the verse as “mean spirited”. She said that “to say he has no talent is ridiculous”.

She thought some of it, however, was “really witty”.

The parodist suggested that Heaney was ploughing an old familiar furrow, conveying the impression of an Ireland that had its head in the classics and its feet in the soil? But Morrissey added, “Heaney is writing out of his own experience and it is not legitimate to deny anyone that.”

Professor Edna Longley, one of the foremost Irish critics, said that she thought the parody was “An oblique tribute no one should get cross about.”

She also thought that the parody in Private Eye attacked a range

of Irish poets, including her husband Michael Longley. The reference to an otter was from Michael Longley. The grandfather’s false teeth “marinading in Steradent” was also an extrapolation of an image used in one of Longley’s anti-war poems.

Oblique as that reading may be, the target here is clearly Heaney and his works. But Longley felt the mock-heroic poem “shows the strength of Irish poetry that it is being attacked in this way”.

Coleraine-born Iggy McGovern also noticed that the writer was acquainted with a range of Irish poets and was drawing more on others than on Heaney. He said: “There's only one Heaney image (soda bread); the Guinness is more Durcan and McCavity is surely Tomcat Eliot. The Oirishry wouldn't be out of place in The Quiet Man.”

It would, however, be out of place in Heaney and not even those who dislike his rural, Catholic concerns take him for a stage Paddy.

Paul Maddern, who compiled the audio archive of poetry readings for Queen’s University, Belfast, was appalled at the confidence of the parodist that this was a fresh, imaginative and brave case being made against Heaney.

Maddern added: “As any decent satirist and literary historian would know, the Irish have self-deflation down to art form. They’re better at doing it than any of their critics and do it with wit and intelligence.” He pointed to poets like Alan Gillis and Conor O’Callaghan who “challenge what it is to write ‘the Irish poem'”.

Co Down poet Grainne Tobin read the attack on Heaney as sectarian and racist. “This is by someone who thinks Irishness itself is comical. I suppose my instinctively hostile reaction is because Famous Seamus is real, and a decent man, and one of our own. Also, I have seen him being well mannered and suffering fools gladly in a traditional country way when Private Eye type metropolitan people might be nasty or abrupt.”

But that does point to something in Heaney, other than his poetry, which makes him much loved as well as much admired and obviously much envied.

He is extraordinarily affable and civil and is renowned world-over as prompt and considerate in his handling of personal correspondence with both the lofty and the low.

Heaney did a reading at the Aspects Arts Festival last month. You can hear a bit of it on Artstalk.net. It would not be cynical to imagine that many of those who were warmed by his presentation didn’t get all the allusions.

His genius — and what is at the core of the would-be parodist's annoyance — is his will and capacity to meld the common and the extraordinary, the sacred and the profane, the classical and the folkway. Anahorish with Athens, so to speak.

It's a touch the parodist simply doesn't have and the clumsy ‘plain man' speech of the last verse only serves to emphasise what the anonymous writer sorely lacks.

The power, the skill, the generosity and the grace of his or her subject.