Seamus Heaney

CADENA HUMANA, novísmo poemario del Nobel irlandes Seamus Heaney, es, sin duda, la culminación de su obra. Esto significa, simplemente, que haya alcanzado una meta trazada, deseada, soñada, avizorada, calculada o labrada con suma delicadeza y esfuerzo. Ademas de lo anterior, el autor ha conseguido ahora, en particular, demostrar una notable congruencia con lo que siempre ha pensado, sentido, dicho. Nunca se ha cansado de insistir en que la forma es tanto el ancla como el barco, es decir, debe lograr la perfecta armonia con lo expresado en el poema. En Cadena humana no hay una estructura elegida, una sola rima, un metro, una cantidad silabica que no coincida y concuerde con la sustancia que la nutre. En plena madurez, dueño ya de una absoluta destreza en cuanto al manejo de los vehiculos de su verso, Heaney genera una luminosidad extraordinaria tanto en el lado de la vida que se inicia con un primer aliento, como de la muerte que se inicia al exhalar en este mundo inhalando en otro, todo a base de detalles personalisimos que, ahora, merced a tangibles y humanos eslabones, resultan tambien nuestros, recien nacidos en nuestra lengua, como si los hubieramos dado la luz, puestos a prueba, habiendo ya despegado, como su papalote, por cuenta propia, y a la vez "como caidos del cielo

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.

El conjunto de estos ensayos es una prueba manifiesta de la creencia de Heaney en que la poesía, en palabras de Yorgos Seferis, «tiene la fuerza suficiente para ayudar».El poeta irlandés Seamus Heane

Poeta doctus por antonomasia, Seamus Heaney sabe que el valor de los clásicos reside en lo imperecedero de sus modelos. Por eso su versión de la Antígona de Sófocles tenía que ser algo más que arqueologia: en Sepelio en Tebas, Antigona, Ismene, Creonte, Tiresias... respiran de nuevo para devolvernos lo eterno de un conflicto que nos recuerda las diversas facetas del deber y de la responsabilidad. Heaney le guarda a Sofocles (y Hernan Bravo Varela a Heaney) la fidelidad que solo un poeta podria ofrecer: fidelidad a la historia y a los hallazgos del verso, al ritmo de los hechos y a su impacto en el lector. Que esto sea igual casi dos mil quinientos años despues señala tanto la invariable caducidad de lo humano como lo milagroso de su talento para revivir, de entre la ceniza, lo que nos hace ser nosotros, fugaces y perennes, fragiles y rectos como el bambu y la palabra de los clasicos.

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.

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".

These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetrys special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He proceeds to explore how this redress manifests itself in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowes Hero and Leander, The Midnight Court by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Brian Merriman, John Clares vernacular writing and Oscar Wildes The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Several twentieth-century poets are also discussed - W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop and others - and the whole book constitutes a vivid proof of the claim that poetry is strong enough to help.

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaneys work, taking account of recent volumes and of the authors work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a Collected Poems as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that have appeared since, together with examples of his work as a translator from the Greek, Latin, Italian and other languages. The book concludes with Crediting Poetry, the speech with which Seamus Heaney accepted the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, for his works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth.

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaneys new verse translation of Sophocles great tragedy, Antigone - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in Western drama. Faithful to the local row and to the fierce specificity of the plays time and place, The Burial at Thebes honours the separate and irreconcilable claims of its opposed voices, as they enact the ancient but perennial conflict between family and state in a time of crisis, pitching the morality of private allegiance against that of public service. Above all, The Burial at Thebes honours the sovereign urgency and grandeur of the Antigone, in which language speaks truth to power, then and now.

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

In 2013, Seamus Heaney met with Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis in Dublin. He said that one project he would very much like to complete would be to prepare a personal selection from across the entire arc of his poetry, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to make the selection in his lifetime, and after his passing, the project was initially set aside. But now, at last, it has been returned to once more, and the result is an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. Coinciding with the opening by the National Library of Ireland of a permanent exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Seamus Heaney, this is a singular, accessible selection for new and younger readers that has the opportunity to reach far and wide, now and ahead.

Seamus Heaneys version of Sophocless Philoctetes tells of the wounded hero marooned upon an island by the Greeks during the Siege of Troy. As the conflict comes to a climax, the Greeks begin to realise they cannot win the Trojan war without Philoctetess invincible bow, and turn back to seek his help.The Cure at Troy dramatises the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency, and explores ways in which the victims of injustice can become as devoted to the contemplation of their wounds as the perpetrators are to the justification of their system. Responsive to the Greek playwrights understanding of the relations between public and private morality, The Cure at Troy is a sharp, fast-paced retelling of the Greek original, shot through with Heaneys own Irish speech and context.History says, Dont hope On this side of the grave.But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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