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

Seamus Heaney, uno de los más grandes poetas en lengua inglesa del siglo XX, nació en 1939, en County Derry, Irlanda del Norte. Hizo sus estudios primarios en una escuela del condado y a los once años gano una beca para el St. Columbs College, un centro catolico situado en Derry donde residio hasta su traslado a la Queens University de Belfast en 1957, ciudad en la que concluyo su carrera universitaria y en la que permanecio hasta 1972.

Nos sentimos orgullosos de presentar, por primera vez al público de lengua española, una amplia antología que reúne los ensayos literarios de Seamus Heaney, el Premio Nobel de Literatura de 1995. La seleccion y traduccion han corrido a cargo del excelente poeta Francesc Parcerisas, buen conocedor de la obra de Heaney. De la emocion a las palabras ofrece un variado panorama de la perspicacia critica de Heaney, una labor que suele centrarse en la lectura atenta, detallada e interiorizada, de la obra de otros poetas modernos, principalmente de lengua inglesa. Los ensayos de Heaney sirven tambien para dejar constancia de su constante examen de conciencia por equilibrar, desde el mundo de la creacion literaria, las demandas opuestas de la realidad social y politica y las del mundo de la lirica; resultan especialmente vividas sus referencias al conflicto irlandes o a la obra de poetas de la Europa del este que tuvieron que enfrentarse al totalitarismo politico. El volumen contiene, ademas, reminiscencias autobiograficas sobre el mundo rural de su infancia, la iniciacion a la lectura, refranes y canciones o sus inicios como escritor. En el ensayo que da titulo a esta seleccion, Heaney permite que sigamos el proceso de creacion y, mas adelante, analiza lo que considera una musica propia en la voz de distintos poetas y el sentido de pertenencia y enraizamiento a un lugar como uno de los posibles elementos de autenticidad de la poesia. En cuanto a los ensayos sobre poetas como Wordsworth, Yeats, Kavanagh, Auden, Lowell y Silvia Plath sirven para ilustrar, a traves de poemas y fragmentos, los caminos internos de la composicion literaria y los distintos momentos en la evolucion de estos poetas.

A collection of poetry by the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, read by the author. It includes the works "Mossbawn", "Sunlight", "Personal Helicon", "Bogland" and "The Tollund Man".

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.

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".

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.

A marvellous book, lovingly edited, beautifully produced. . . and brimming with literary insights, much laughter, a sprinkle of gossip and the poets insuppressible joie de vivre, even in adversity. Buy it, read it, and keep it to hand on to your children.John Banville, GuardianAn epistolary cornucopia. . . contains an abundance of insight and illumination, literary gossip and appraisal, playfulness and cogency, all bound up with a steadfast attention to the feelings and expectations of each correspondent. Patricia Craig, TLS Books of the YearEvery now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two . . .For all his public eminence, Seamus Heaney seems never to have lost the compelling need to write personal letters. In this ample but discriminating selection from fifty years of his correspondence, we are given access as never before to the life and poetic development of a literary titan - from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of a Nobel Prize and the years of international acclaim that kept him heroically busy until his death.Editor Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this story in the poets own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic and deeply thoughtful, the letters encompass decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as showing an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. Moreover, Heaneys joyous mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writing for a literary readership.Listening to Heaneys voice, we find ourselves in the same room as a man whose presence, when he lived, enriched the world immeasurably, and whose legacy continues to deepen our sense of what truly matters.

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.

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.

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