Seamus Heaney

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

This is the first ever collected volume of Seamus Heaneys translations from languages including Old and Middle Irish and English, Medieval Italian, Classical Greek and Latin and Modern Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, German and Greek.

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

An irresistibly coherent book which celebrates the rising and the raising of the human spirit. Michael Hofmann, The TimesIf any poetry written today can have this redemptive effect - as Heaney in his critical writing has begun to claim it can - then this is it. Mick Imlah, Independent on Sunday

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

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaneys prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and the contemporary world?As well as being a selection from the poets three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry), the present volume includes material from The Place of Writing, a series of lectures delivered at Emory University in 1988. Also included are a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to more extended lectures and contributions to books, including Place and Displacement (1984), only available previously as a pamphlet, and Burnss Art Speech, written for the bicentennial of Robert Burnss death. In its soundings of a wide range of poets - Irish and British, American and East European, predecessors and contemporaries - Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, an announcement of both excitement and possession.

In North Seamus Heaney found a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland - its people, history and landscape. Here the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

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.

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.

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

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".

Electric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poets childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.Electric Light ranges from short takes (glosses) to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to the must and drift of talk; other poems are arranged in sections, their separate cargoes docked alongside each other to reveal a hidden and curative connection. The presocratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming the real names of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poets calling to assign to things their proper names. The resulting poems are full of delicately prescriptive tonalities, where Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and rollcall in this, his eleventh collection.

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.