Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet celebrated for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth. His poetry frequently exalts everyday miracles and brings the living past vibrantly to life. Through his writing, he explored the complexities of human experience and the profound connection to the land. Heaney's distinctive voice offers readers a rich engagement with language and the enduring resonance of memory.
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. But now, finally, the project has been
returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced
by the Heaney family.
New Selected Poems 1988-2013 offers the poems that Heaney himself selected from his collections Seeing Things, The Spirit Level, Beowulf, Electric Light, District and Circle and Human Chain.
There is something about a treasure, wrote Joseph Conrad, that fastens on a man's mind. And, yes, there is something about the subject of treasure hunting that continues to fascinate us. One need only browse the Web to discover a whole netherworld of treasure-hunting magazines, metal-detector clubs, and lost-mine information exchanges that apparently engage the funds and spare time of thousands of hopefuls. Charles Elliott recaptures the essential romance of the search in this collection of classic stories. Many are true - or purport to be. They take place under the sea, in jungles, on desert islands, even in the attics of old houses. What is common to them all is the excitement of the chase and the possibility - irrational, perhaps, but unavoidable - that a fabulous treasure really is there for the finding.
Exploring themes of personal reflection and connection to place, the collection captures Seamus Heaney's transformative journey from the turmoil of Belfast to the tranquility of Glanmore, County Wicklow. Over four years, Heaney shifts from political poetry to a more introspective style, infusing his work with a meditative quality. This evolution showcases his deepening understanding of the relationship between self and environment, revealing a new strength and maturity in his writing.
The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.
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'.
This is the first ever collected volume of Seamus Heaney's translations from languages including Old and Middle Irish and English, Medieval Italian, Classical Greek and Latin and Modern Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, German and Greek
This volume gathers nearly all of the poems from Heaney's first four Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975).