Seamus Heaney, página 2 de 4

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Un recueil de poèmes parus en 1991 et 1996, oeuvres de la maturité de l'auteur dont l'univers est marqué par l'omniprésence du monde rural et par le douloureux conflit qui a impacté l'histoire de l'I

Seamus Heaney''s 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 twenty-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: Again the growl / Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble / Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal / Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.

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.

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.