Seamus Heaney

Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field

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This collection of thirty-one poems is Seamus Heaney's first since Station Island. The Haw Lantern is a magnificent book that further extends the range of a poet who has always put his trust in the possibilities of the language.

Whether autobiographical, topical, or specifically literary, these writings circle the central preoccupying questions of Seamus Heaney's career: "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?" Along with a selection from the poet's three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue, and The Redress of Poetry),...

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"...

A masterpiece from one of the greatest poets of the century In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's 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 O'Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the significance of the poem to his writing, noting that "there's one Virgilian journey that has...

Poems, 1965-1975 gathers nearly all of the poems from Seamus Heaney's first four collections: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975).

In The Spirit Level, as ever with Seamus Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects, a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing, are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing 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.

The title poem of this collection, set on an Irish island, tells of a pilgrim on an inner journey that leads him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called the narrative sequence in Seamus Heaney's Station Island "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years."

Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He saw poetry as a vocation and credited it with "the power to persuade the vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values." Paul Muldoon wrote that Heaney was...