The powerful collection by the bestselling translator of Beowulf
In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold In the everything flows and steady go of the world. --from "Perch"
Seamus Heaney's collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world and revisiting the poet's 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...
The powerful collection by the bestselling translator of Beowulf
In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air
A selection of the best of three decades of writing about poetry, a celebration of the "tenacious curiosity" (Los Angeles Times) of the Nobel laureate
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 his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage, and the contemporary world?"
Along with a selection from Heaney's three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue,...
A selection of the best of three decades of writing about poetry, a celebration of the "tenacious curiosity" (Los Angeles Times) of the Nobel la...
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 colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous...
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 condi...
Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, '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.
Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, 'Beowulf' is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who s...
The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants' traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants' traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. After a visit with his wife in 1972, Tim Robinson moved to the islands, where he started making maps and gathering stories, eventually...
The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty an...
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 Work he "brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world" (Denis...
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 famil...
Irish poetry is among the most vibrant language cultures in the world. A decade on from the landmark anthology Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland, 1999), Flowing, Still reissues the ten introductory essays from that book-by some of the best-known figures in contemporary Irish poetry, among them Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Eavan Boland and Ciaran Carson-adding a number of extended essays which bring the book up to the present day. This new volume aims to provide students and general readers alike with an affordable single-volume...
Irish poetry is among the most vibrant language cultures in the world. A decade on from the landmark anthology Watching the River Flow: A Century in I...
The greatest of the late medieval Scots makars, Robert Henryson was influenced by their vision of the frailty and pathos of human life, and by the inherited poetic example of Geoffrey Chaucer. Henryson's finest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of Scots literature, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, the Testament completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover, Diomede, and of her subsequent decline into prostitution and...
The greatest of the late medieval Scots makars, Robert Henryson was influenced by their vision of the frailty and pathos of human life, and ...
A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award
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...
A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award
"Between my fingers and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it."
Selected Poems 1966-1987 assembles the groundbreaking work of the first half of Seamus Heaney's extraordinary career. This edition, arranged by the author himself, includes the seminal early poetry that struck readers with the force of revelation and heralded the arrival of an heir to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost. Helen Vendler called Heaney "a poet of the in-between," and the work collected here dwells in the borderlands dividing the ancient and the contemporary, the...
"Between my fingers and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it."
Selected Poems 1966-1987 assembles the groundbreaking w...
