Seamus Heaney had the idea to form a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, and no other edition exists which has such a broad range, drawing from first to last of his prize-winning collections. But now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, as well as discovering new favourites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching out far and wide, now and for years to come.

Seamus Heaney had the idea to form 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 do this in his lifetime, and no edition exists which has such a broad range, drawing from first collection to last. But now, at last, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. Coinciding with the National Library of Ireland launching a major exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Seamus Heaney, 100 Poems is a singular, accessible collection for new and younger readers that has the opportunity to reach far and wide, now and for years to come.

Every 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 poet's 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, Heaney's joyous mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writing for a literary readership. Listening to Heaney's 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.

'A huge book, an immense book. Such adventure and variety, such industry, such subjugation of self.' Michael Hofmann, TLS Heaney not only translated classic works of Latin and Old English but also poems from a great number of ancient and modern European languages, not least translations from the Old, Middle and Modern Irish of his homeland. The breadth and depth in evidence here is extraordinary - from monastic hymns and prayers, to the civic and familial tragedies of Sophocles and Kochanowski; from Virgil and Dante's living underworld to the stark landscapes of Sweeney's Ireland. As editor, Marco Songzogni frames the translations with the poet's own writings on his works. Collectively these bring us closer to an understanding of the genius for interpretation and transformation that distinguished Heaney as one of the great poet-translators of all time. 'The Translations . . . is a landmark volume, a striking testament to the particular and generous genius of Seamus Heaney. . . The crucial part played by translation in the formation and development of his extraordinary talent is under the spotlight as readers are further gifted with Marco Sonzogni's meticulously detailed notes. . ..' Martina Evans, Irish Times '.this volume is handsome testimony to Heaney's lifelong service to a noble art.' David Wheatley, Guardian 'This magnificent book. . . is without a doubt a compendium to be cherished, and to be celebrated.' Paul Perry, Sunday Independent

With this collection, first published in 1975, Heaney located a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland—its people, history, and landscape—and which gave his poems direction, cohesion, and cumulative power. In North, 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.

For the fortieth anniversary of its publication, in May 2006, Faber are reissuing Seamus Heaney's classic first collection, Death of a Naturalist, which on its appearance in 1966 won the Cholmondeley Award, the E.C. Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. 'His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry. The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems I've read for some time.' - C.B. Cox in the Spectator 'The power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death of a Naturalist is outstanding [...] His subject is those things which are inherent or inherited. What he praises is to be praised in his own work.' - Christopher Ricks, New Statesman 'Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.'

This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's 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 Banville 'More 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

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. (from 'District and Circle')

Sophocles' play, first staged in the fifth century B.C., stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides of the battle. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all of her close kin. Enraged, Creon condemns her to death, and his soldiers wall her up in a tomb. While Creon eventually agrees to Antigone's release, it is too late: She takes her own life, initiating a tragic repetition of events in her family's history.
In this outstanding new translation, commissioned by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary, Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles' masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.

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 individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death. 'Throughout the volume Heaney's 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

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in ?Beowulf? and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

A "Boston Globe" Best Poetry Book of 2011

Seamus Heaney's 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, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 101" plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead--friends, neighbors, family--that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular.
"Human Chain "also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic--lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included

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.

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 Heaney's 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.

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the last twenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by scholar-poet Andrew McNeillie, with the assistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine the relationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought together established and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the study of islands, coasts and waterways. It journeys from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from the Aran Islands to the coast of Yorkshire, tracing the cultures of diverse zones through some of the best in contemporary writing about place and people. This collection gathers poetry, prose and visual art in clusters grouped around the Irish and British archipelago, with contributions from an array of significant artists. With fifty contributors, Archipelago: A Reader includes: Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with seven published collections, the most recent being Collected Poems (2021). Deirdre Ni Chonghaile is a graduate of the University of Oxford and University College Cork. She is associated with NUI, Galway, and the University of Notre Dame, and is known for her work in music studies. Tim Dee is a naturalist, BBC radio producer and author of The Running Sky (2018). Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was born in Northern Ireland. His career included teaching at Harvard and Oxford. He received many awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1995. Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish writer whose work has appeared internationally. She has taught poetry at the University of Stirling since 2010. Michael Longley is a Northern Irish poet, and winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017. Robert Macfarlane is a Writing Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He has won the EM Forster Award for Literature. Derek Mahon (1941-2020) was a Northern Irish poet. He won the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the Poetry Now Award. Andrew McNeillie is a Welsh poet and current Literature Editor at Oxford University Press. His memoir An Aran Keening was published by The Lilliput Press, and he is founder of the Clutag Press and publisher of the Archipelago series. Sinead Morrisey is a Northern Irish winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize. She has taught in Belfast and Newcastle. 'Archipelago met and extended my own strong sense that there was a need to turn the compass-rose of some storytelling and art in Britain and Ireland away from the south and east and towards the north and west; away from the metropolis and towards the margins.' -Robert Macfarlane

Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf (1999) was hailed as a masterpiece, alerting readers to his extraordinary ability to tune into other poets and languages and render their work fresh and alive in his own voice. In fact, as this volume attests, from the very beginning translation informed over fifty years of Heaney's critical and creative output, to which the posthumous publication of his translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI (2016) - also widely acclaimed - made a fitting epilogue. Heaney not only translated classic works of Latin and Old English but also a great number of poems from Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Russian, German, Scottish Gaelic, Czech, classical and modern Greek, modern and Middle French, medieval and modern Italian, and more. He was drawn in particular to the language of his homeland, a preoccupation that runs through this volume in those translations from Old, Middle and modern Irish. As he said: 'If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood, you lived in a primal Gaeltacht.' The breadth and depth in evidence here is extraordinary: from the stark landscapes of Sweeney's Ireland to Virgil and Dante's living underworlds, from monastic hymns and prayers to the civic and familial tragedies of Sophocles and Kochanowski. As editor, Marco Sonzogni frames the translations with the poet's own writings on his works, drawing from various introductions, interviews and commentaries. Collectively we are brought closer to an understanding of the remarkable extent of Heaney's talent, a genius for interpretation and transformation that distinguish him as one of the great poet-translators of all time.

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney's 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 play's time and place, The Burial at Thebes represents opposing voices as they enact the ancient 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 thumb The 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's finest poets.

'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 Times 'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement

Recorded in 2009, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney reads his first eleven collections of poems in their entirety. In this new edition Faber has added live readings by the poet of eleven poems from his final collection, Human Chain (2010), to complete the collection. '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 Banville 'More 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 'Heaney's voice, by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive, is one of a suppleness almost equal to consciousness itself.' Helen Vendler 'There are few poets whose reading voice is so crucial to the poems' effect' - Bernard O'Donoghue, The Irish Times. Death of a Naturalist Door into the Dark Wintering Out North Field Work Station Island (part one) Station island (part two & three) The Haw Lantern Seeing Things (part one) Seeing Things (part two) The Spirit Level (part one) The Spirit Level (part two) Electric Light (part one) Electric Light (part two) District and Circle Human Chain

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf ?is the elegiac narrative of the Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in ?Beowulf ?and its immense emotional credibility Seamus Heaney gives the great epic convincing reality

But how to visualize the poet's story has always been a challenge for modern-day readers. In Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, John D. Niles, a specialist in Old English literature, provides visual counterparts to Heaney's remarkable translation. More than one hundred full-page illustrations Viking warships, chain mail, lyres, spearheads, even a reconstruction of the Great Hall make visible Beowulf's world and the elemental themes of his story: death, divine power, horror, heroism, disgrace, devotion, and fame. This mysterious world is now transformed into one of material splendor as readers view its elegant goblets, dragon images, and finely crafted gold jewelry against the backdrop of the Danish landscape of its origins."

This Norton Critical Edition includes: * Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's poetic translation of the great Anglo-Saxon epic-winner of the Whitbread Prize-along with his translator's introduction. * Detailed explanatory annotations and an introduction to Old English language and prosody by Daniel Donoghue. * More than two dozen visuals, including, new to the Second Edition, a fine selection of objects from the Staffordshire Hoard. * A rich array of Anglo-Saxon and early northern civilisation materials, providing student readers with Beowulf's cultural and historical context. * Nine critical interpretations, three of them new to the Second Edition. * A glossary of personal names and a selected bibliography.

Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles's 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 Philoctetes's 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 playwright's 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 Heaney's own Irish speech and context.

History says, Don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.