New Releases by Seamus Heaney

The letters provide us with an intimate, multilayered understanding of this extraordinary poet’s life and mind. 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. In this astute selection from Seamus Heaney’s vast correspondence, we are given direct access to the life and poetic development of a literary titan, from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the years of international eminence that kept him heroically busy until his death. Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this remarkable story in the poet’s own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic, and deeply thoughtful, The Letters of Seamus Heaney encompasses decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. Heaney’s mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writings; listening to his voice we find ourselves in the same room as a man whose presence enriched the world and whose legacy deepens our sense of what truly matters.

The complete translations of the poet Seamus Heaney, a Nobel laureate and prolific, revolutionary translator. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, published in 1999, was immediately hailed as an undisputed masterpiece, “something imperishable and great” (James Wood, The Guardian). A few years after his death in 2013, his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI caused a similar stir, providing “a remarkable and fitting epilogue to one of the great poetic careers of recent times” (Nick Laird, Harper’s Magazine). Now, for the first time, the poet, critic, and essayist’s translations are gathered in one volume. Heaney translated not only classic works of Latin and Old English but also a great number of poems from Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Russian, German, Scottish Gaelic, Czech, Ancient and Modern Greek, Middle and Modern French, and Medieval and Modern Italian, among other languages. In particular, the Nobel laureate engaged with works in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish, the languages of his homeland and early education. As he said, “If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood, you lived in a primal Gaeltacht.” In The Translations of Seamus Heaney, Marco Sonzogni has collected Heaney’s translations and framed them with the poet’s own writings on his works and their composition, sourced from introductions, interviews, and commentaries. Through this volume, we come closer to grasping the true extent of Heaney’s extraordinary abilities and his genius.

In 2013, Seamus Heaney met with Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis in Dublin. He said that one project he would very much like to complete would be to prepare 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 make the selection in his lifetime, and after his passing, the project was initially set aside. But now, at last, it has been returned to once more, and the result is an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. Coinciding with the opening by the National Library of Ireland of a permanent exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Seamus Heaney, this is a singular, accessible selection for new and younger readers that has the opportunity to reach far and wide, now and ahead.

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 indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas''s venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years--the golden bough, Charon''s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father." In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and sophisticated poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of James Wood, "created something imperishable and great that is stainless--stainless, because its force as poetry makes it untouchable by the claw of literalism: it lives singly, as an English language poem."

«Nel canone di Seamus Heaney La lanterna di biancospino occupa un posto importante di riflessione, di recupero, si può dire quasi di silloge di momenti del percorso del suo autore, per un nuovo slancio e per una riconquista di freschezza comunicativa.» Come osserva Francesca Romana Paci nell''introduzione, The Haw Lantern è una raccolta dotata di struttura unitaria e va letta dunque come sistema. Un sistema in cui si mantiene vivo il coraggio di una ricerca «fondata nel reale, ricerca dei confini e del senso del reale stesso, del rapporto della mente con il reale, della verità nella contraddizione, dell''equilibrio tra tensioni opposte, della libertà pur nella indiscussa permanenza di legami importanti: questo è il cuore della poetica di Heaney, il vero argomento di tutta la sua poesia, il suo vero, continuo oggetto d''indagine».

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.

Death of a Naturalist (1966) marked the auspicious debut of Seamus Heaney, a universally acclaimed master of modern literature. As a first book of poems, it is remarkable for its accurate perceptions and rich linguistic gifts.

Door into the Dark, Seamus Heaney''s second collection of poems, first appeared in 1969. Already his widely celebrated gifts of precision, thoughtfulness, and musicality were everywhere apparent.

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), the present volume includes Heaney''s finest lectures and a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to radio commentaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets -- Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors and contemporaries -- Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, "an announcement of both excitement and possession."

With this collection, first published in 1975, Heaney located a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland--its people, history, and landscape--and which gave his poems direction, cohesion, and cumulative power. In North, 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 Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

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).

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.

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney''s first collection of prose, Preoccupations, begins with a vivid account of his early years on his father''s farm in Northern Ireland and his coming of age as a student and teacher in Belfast. Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney''s version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibne. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. Heaney''s translation not only restores to us a work of historical and literary importance but offers the genius of one of our greatest living poets to reinforce its claims on the reader of contemporary literature.

"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 mythic and the quotidian. Gathering poetry from his first seven collections, Selected Poems 1966-1987 presents the young man from County Derry, Northern Ireland, who "emerged from a hidden, a buried life" in Death of a Naturalist (1966), with his cherished poems "Digging" and "Mid-term Break"; the poet of conscience "as bleak as he is bright" in "Whatever You Say Say Nothing" and "Singing School"; and the astonishingly gifted, mature craftsman behind Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984)-an artist uncannily attuned to the "music of what happens," restlessly searching "for images and symbols adequate to our predicament." This volume, together with its companion Selected Poems 1988-2013, allows us to revisit the essential work of one of the great writers of our age through his own compilation.

Questa e una raccolta di 21 poesie del Premio Nobel per la Letteratura 1995, Seamus Heaney, tratte da ""The Spirit Level,"" nella traduzione italiana di Erminia Passannanti. L''espressione "fortuna letteraria" e particolarmente idonea a descrivere il percorso compiuto dall''opera di Seamus Heaney nell''arco di un ventennio. L''assegnazione del Nobel per la Letteratura, nel 1995, a questo autore, mentre rappresentava il massimo tributo a un''arte poetica che aveva saputo guadagnarsi un successo di portata mondiale, focalizzava l''attenzione dell''opinione pubblica su tutta la poesia irlandese contemporanea prodotta nel nord dell''isola, e dunque, in modo indiretto, sui primi seri tentativi di una sistemazione politica del conflitto civile in nord-Irlanda.

''Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.'' Eavan Boland, Irish Times ''Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.'' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement

The title poem from this collection is set on an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. A narrative sequence, it is an autobiographical quest concerned with ''the growth of a poet''s mind''. The long poem is preceded by a section of shorter lyrics and leads into a third group of poems in which the poet''s voice is at one with the voice of the legendary mad King Sweeney. ''Surpasses even what one might reasonably expect from this magnificently gifted poet.'' John Carey, Sunday Times

This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney''s published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987). ''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.'' John Banville ''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 Carey

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something fundamental to his own creative gift. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels between this story and the history of the twentieth century, nor can Heaney''s Beowulf fail to be read partly in the light of his Northern Irish upbringing. But it also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating.

Heaney''s new collection of poetry maintains his trust in the implacableness of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

In this English translation of poems written by Ozef Kalda, which were set to music by Leos Janacek, the folktale of a farmer''s boy who abandons his home because he has fallen in love with a gypsy is told.

"Each of the translations in this book can be read for its own sake or as part of a triptych. By setting excerpts of Brian Merriman''s Cuirt an Mhean Oiche within the acoustic of a classical myth (the story of Orpheus and Eurydice), Seamus Heaney provides a new and illuminating context for the eighteenth century Irish poem. For this paperback reissue, the poet has made some revisions in the text of the original Gallery Press edition."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Collection of poems by the 1995 Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet.

Examines the works of a range of poets to discuss poetry''s ability to redress spiritual balance as a counterweight to oppressive forces.