Selected Poems 1988-2013

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374535612
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
A new edition of the later selected work of a Nobel Prize-winning poet Often considered to be "the greatest poet of our age" (The Guardian), 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 "the only poet I can think of who was recognized worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority." Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney began to compile Selected Poems 1988–2013, and although he was unable to complete the project, his choices have been followed here. This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991) with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996) where we experience "the poem as ploughshare that turns time / Up and over."; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past.

100 Poems

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720118
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
Selected poems from a Nobel laureate In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, and will discover new favorites, from "The Cure at Troy" to "Death of a Naturalist." It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching far and wide, for now and for years to come. Seamus Heaney had the idea to make a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, a collection small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, but now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. No other selection of Heaney’s poems exists that has such a broad range, drawing from the first to the last of his prizewinning collections.

Human Chain

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466855673
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 78

Book Description
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 at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 101" plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.

Stepping Stones

Author: Dennis O'Driscoll
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374269831
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Book Description
Chronicles the life of twentieth-century Irish poet Seamus Heaney, from his infancy to his Nobel Prize in 1995, and also discusses his post-Nobel life, family, writings, and other related topics.

District and Circle

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466855495
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 109

Book Description
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 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. District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Wintering Out

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Book Description

Field Work

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 146685569X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 73

Book Description
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 Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).

The Redress of Poetry

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466855770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Heaney's ten lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, collected here in The Redress of Poetry, explore the poetry of a wide range of writers, from Christopher Marlowe to John Clare to Oscar Wilde. Whether he concentrates on moments in the works under discussion, or is concerned to advance his general subject, Heaney's insight and eloquence are themselves of poetic order.

Collected Later Poems, 1988-2000

Author: Ronald Stuart Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is one of the major poets of the twentieth-century, the greatest Welsh poet since Dylan Thomas, and one of the finest religious poets in the English language. This substantial gathering of his late poems shows us the final flowering of a truly great poet still writing at the height of his powers in his 70s and 80s. It begins with his autobiographical sequence, The Echoes Return Slow, unavailable for many years, and also includes, Counterpoint, Mass for Hard Times, No Truce With the Furies, and his final collection, Residues.

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

Author: Lucille Clifton
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
ISBN: 1942683006
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 747

Book Description
Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965–1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.