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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.
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.'
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.
'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
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
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100 Poems (Paperback)
Seamus Heaney
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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.
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.
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.
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
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Archipelago Anthology (Paperback)
Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane, Sinead Morrisey, Andrew McNeillie, …
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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
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.
T.S. Eliot - editor, poet, critic and publisher - was the greatest
poet of his generation. The winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for
Literature, virtually every English language poet since owes him a
debt of gratitude. Voted as Britain's favourite poet in a 2009 BBC
poll, Eliot selected and designed this collection himself in 1954
as an introduction to his work for new readers. Containing 'The
Waste Land' and 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Selected
Poems is the perfect way to begin with one of the defining figures
of the twentieth century. This edition also features an
introductory essay by Seamus Heaney.
'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
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.
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.
This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work,
taking account of recent volumes and of the author's 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'.
The poems in Seamus Heaney's collection The Spirit Level keep
discovering the possibilities of 'a new beginning' in all kinds of
subjects and circumstances. What is at stake, in poem after poem,
is the chance of buoyancy and balance, physical, spiritual and
political. Private memories, classical scenes, humble domestic
objects - a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing - are endowed with
talismanic significance, while friends and relatives are invoked
for their promise and steadfastness. Throughout the collection,
Heaney addresses his concerns, which inevitably include the
political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry
that never ceases to be fluid, alert and completely truthful.
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet
of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and
critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors
offer insights into their own work as well as providing an
accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets
in our literature. Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull
would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its
majesty . . . -- Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3,
1802
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