Seamus Heaney

Con la concesión del Premio Nobel en 1995 se reconocía una de las aventuras poeticas más arriesgadas y logradas del siglo xx: la de Seamus Heaney. Su extensa obra abordó el abandono de los enclaves rurales, la dificil adaptacion a un entorno urbano cada vez mas aseptico, y las presiones que la politica (y la violencia) ejercen sobre el hombre contemporaneo. Heaney barajo durante años preparar una seleccion de sus poemas que fuese representativa de su extensisima obra. Murio sin rematar la seleccion, pero dejo indicaciones para orientar a sus descendientes. El resultado es 100 poemas, un viaje que va desde las impresionantes descripciones del campo irlandes hasta las ºltimas meditaciones inspiradas por la sabiduria acumulada durante una vida entera de observaciones y reflexion. Uno de los pocos poetas del siglo xx que merecen el adjetivo de "imprescindible".

Con la concesión del Premio Nobel en 1995 se reconocía una de las aventuras poéticas más arriesgadas y logradas del siglo XX: la de Seamus Heaney. Su obra abordó el abandono de los enclaves rurales, la dificil adaptacion a un entrono urbano cada vez mas aseptico, y las presiones que la politica (y la violencia) ejercen sobre el hombre contemporaneo. Heaney barajo durante años preparar una seleccion de sus poemas que fuese representativa de su extensisima obra, un libro que sirviese de introduccion a su mundo, al tiempo que contendria la medula de su legado. Murio sin rematar la seleccion, pero dejo indicaciones para orientar a sus descendientes, quienes tambien contaban con el testimonio de la palabra viva de Heaney sobre sus poemas favoritos, aquellos que consideraba sus logros superiores. El resultado es 100 poemas, un viaje que va desde las impresionantes descripciones del campo irlandes hasta las ultimas meditaciones inspiradas por la sabiduria acumulada a lo largo una vida entera de observaciones y reflexion. La antologia definitiva sobre uno de los pocos poetas del siglo XX que merecen el adjetivo de imprescindibles.

New Selected Poems 1988-2013 provides an unrivalled account of a period of work that was crowned by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Together with its earlier, sibling volume, it completes the arc of a remarkable career.Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney discussed with his publisher the prospect of a companion volume to his landmark New Selected Poems 1966-1987 aimed at presenting the second half of his career, from Seeing Things onwards, as he foresaw it. Although he was unable to complete a edition/selection, he left behind selections that have been followed here. New Selected Poems 1988-2013 reprints the authors chosen poems from his later years, beginning with his ground-breaking volume Seeing Things (1991), his two Whitbread Books of the Year, The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999), and his multi-nominated, prize-winning volumes, Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). The edition concludes with two posthumously published works.

Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up. Eavan Boland, Irish TimesKeyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere. Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement

New Selected Poems 1988-2013 provides an unrivalled account of a period of work that was crowned by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Together with its earlier, sibling volume, it completes the arc of a remarkable career. Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney discussed with his publisher the prospect of a companion volume to his landmark New Selected Poems 1966-1987 aimed at presenting the second half of his career, ''from Seeing Things onwards'', as he foresaw it. Although he was unable to complete a edition/selection, he left behind selections that have been followed here. New Selected Poems 1988-2013 reprints the author''s chosen poems from his later years, beginning with his ground-breaking volume Seeing Things (1991), his two Whitbread Books of the Year, The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999), and his multi-nominated, prize-winning volumes, Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). The edition concludes with two posthumously published works.

Seamus Heaneys new collection starts in an age of bare hands and cast iron and ends as the automatic lock / clunks shut in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twentieth-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the heavyweight silence of cattle out in rain - are coloured by a strongly contemporary sense that anything can happen and other images from the dangerous present - a journey on the underground, a melting glacier - are fraught with this same anxiety. But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like The Tollund Man in Springtime and in several poems which do the rounds of the district - its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts - the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

The title poem from this collection is set on an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. A narrative sequence, it is an autobiographical quest concerned with the growth of a poets mind. The long poem is preceded by a section of shorter lyrics and leads into a third group of poems in which the poets voice is at one with the voice of the legendary mad King Sweeney.Surpasses even what one might reasonably expect from this magnificently gifted poet. John Carey, Sunday Times

At the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence which concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: the individuals responsibility for his own choices, the artists commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.Throughout the volume Heaneys outstanding gifts, his eye, his ear, his understanding of the poetic language are on display - this is a book we cannot do without. Martin Dodsworth, Guardian

This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaneys published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987).His is close-up poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does. John BanvilleMore than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of. John Carey

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something fundamental to his own creative gift.The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels between this story and the history of the twentieth century, nor can Heaneys Beowulf fail to be read partly in the light of his Northern Irish upbringing. But it also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating.

Originally published in 1969, Seamus Heaneys Door into the Dark continues a furrow so startlingly opened in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). With the sensuosness and physicality of language that would become the hallmark of his early writing, these poems graphically depict the authors rural upbringing, from the local forge to the banks of Lough Neagh, concluding in the preserving waters of the bogland and a look ahead to his next book, Wintering Out (1972).

Widely and justly celebrated for his flawless handling of the lyric, Seamus Heaney is here shown venturing into new imaginative territory. Poems exploring the theme of loss, and in particular a sonnet sequence concerning the death of the poets mother, are joined in The Haw Lantern by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein that will both surprise and delight the many admirers of his previous work.More than other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of. John Carey, Sunday Times

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaneys version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne - the first complete translation since 1913. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. The poetry spoken by the mad king, exiled to the trees and the slopes, is among the richest and most immediately appealing in the whole canon of Gaelic literature.Sweeney Astray not only restores to us a work of historical and literary importance but offers the genius of one of our greatest living poets to reinforce its claims on the reader of contemporary literature.

The title, The Government of the Tongue, carries suggestions of both monastic discipline and untrammelled romanticism, and is meant to raise an old question about the rights and status of poetic utterance itself. Should it be governed? Should it be the governor?Seamus Heaney here scrutinizes the work of several poets, British and Irish, American and European, whose work is responsive to such strains and tensions.

This collection of Seamus Heaneys work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled "Squarings", shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and "to credit marvels". The title poem, "Seeing Things", is typical of the whole book. It begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary while never relinquishing its feel for the textures and sensations of the world. Translations of Virgil and Homer provide a prelude and a coda where motifs implicit in the earlier lyrics are given direct expression in extended narratives. Journeys to underworlds and otherworlds correspond to the journeys made by poetic language itself. From the author of "The Haw Lantern", "Wintering Out", "Station Island" and "North".

In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaneys translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgils epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis ODriscoll, Heaney acknowledged the importance of the poem to his writing, noting that theres one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneass venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years - the golden bough, Charons barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and flawless poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of Bernard ODonoghue, brought the ancient poem back to life in a miraculous mix of the poems original spirit and Heaneys voice.

Seamus Heaneys new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other hermit songs which weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poets early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled Route 110 plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s adolescence to the birth of the poets first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead - friends, neighbours and family - which is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also adapts a poetic herbal by the Breton poet Guillevic - lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things which excludes human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.Human Chain is Seamus Heaneys twelfth collection of poems.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.-- from DiggingWith its lyrical and descriptive powers, Death of a Naturalist marked the auspicious debut of one of the centurys fines