Seamus Heaney

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...

The whole performance is wonderfully intermediate - poised between the Bible and folk wisdom, between the Light Ages and the Dark Ages - and at the same time pulverisingly actual in its language. Heaney has caught the balance of these brilliantly; he has made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece. Andrew Motion, Financial Times What characterises this Beowulf is its...

'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 CareyThis is the long-awaited, definitive edition of Seamus Heaney's poetry. It encompasses all the poems Heaney published in his lifetime as well as the small number that appeared after his death: twelve single 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. The book concludes with...

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.' New Selected Poems 1966-1987 brings together works that echo with the deep connection to the natural world and human experience. 'More than any other poet since...

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...

Seamus Heaney was 'the greatest poet of our age' (Guardian). From his remarkable debut in 1966, he pioneered the poetry of our times across five decades of cultural and political change, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Field Work, his fifth volume, from 1979, is a collection of poems that were among the finest he would...

Widely praised on its first publication in 1987, The Haw Lantern ventured into new imaginative territory with poems exploring the theme of loss—including a celebrated sonnet sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother—joined by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein. This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten titles...

By conjuring aspects of a shared Northern European experience—its peculiar landscapes and weathers, its sea-faring incursions, the vernaculars of its buried and living peoples—Heaney found a way of articulating a vision of Ireland in which the disruptions and violences of the Troubles could be reflected too. North is set apart from the rest of Heaney's oeuvre because of its brilliant...

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...

Beowulf, composed between the seventh and tenth century, 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 returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid battle against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous,...

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. Death of a Naturalist marks the auspicious outset of an acclaimed master. As a first book of poems, it is remarkable for its accurate perceptions and its rich linguistic gifts....

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...

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 individualised and compelling figures in western drama. The Burial at Thebes explores the dangers of pride and absolute belief regardless of personal, political, and...