Seamus Heaney – författare

On its original appearance in 1966, Death of a Naturalist won the Cholmondeley Award, a Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.'His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry. The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems I've read for some time.' - C.B. Cox in the Spectator'The power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death of a Naturalist is outstanding [...] His subject is those things which are inherent or inherited. What he praises is to be praised in his own work.' - Christopher Ricks, New Statesman''His childhood landscape has acquired the validity of myth.' Michael Longley, Irish TimesNow, to pry into roots, to finger slime,To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some springIs beneath all adult dignity. I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

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 project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. Coinciding with the National Library of Ireland launching a major exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Seamus Heaney, 100 Poems is a singular, accessible collection for new and younger readers that has the opportunity to reach far and wide, now and for years to come.

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: '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?'As well as being 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 material from The Place of Writing, a series of lectures delivered at Emory University in 1988. Also included are a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to more extended lectures and contributions to books, including 'Place and Displacement' (1984), only available previously as a pamphlet, and 'Burns's Art Speech', written for the bicentennial of Robert Burns's death. In its soundings of a wide range of poets - Irish and British, American and East European, predecessors and contemporaries - Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, 'an announcement of both excitement and possession'.

Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and conceived of as a collection of their own favourite poems, The Rattle Bag has established itself as the classic anthology of our time. Heaney and Hughes have brought together an inspired and diverse selection, ranging from undisputed masterpieces to rare discoveries, as well as drawing upon works in translation and traditional poems from oral cultures. In effect, this anthology has transformed the way we define and appreciate poetry, and it will continue to do so for years to come. Including writers from Shakespeare and Blake to Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot, The Rattle Bag is eclectic, instructive and inspiring at the same time.

At the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence which concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.'Throughout the volume Heaney's outstanding gifts, his eye, his ear, his understanding of the poetic language are on display - this is a book we cannot do without.' Martin Dodsworth, Guardian

This edition of Seamus Heaney's seminal fourth collection North, reproduced in its elegant first setting and in its original jacket, marks fifty years since first publication in 1975.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.'. . . it's the brilliant reconciliation of art with politics that sets North apart from the rest of Heaney's oeuvre and gives it a kind of dark majesty.' Robert McCrum, Guardian'The seedtime of the soul and the dissolution of the flesh melt equally into history, exhumed only temporarily in Heaney's penetrating vision, where gravity and preservation unite.' Helen Vendler, New York Times

Originally published in 1969, Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark continues a furrow so startlingly opened in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). With the sensuousness and physicality of language that would become the hallmark of his early writing, these poems graphically depict the author's rural upbringing, from the local forge to the banks of Lough Neagh, concluding in the preserving waters of the bogland and a look ahead to his next book, Wintering Out (1972).

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: 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?As well as being 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 material from 'The Place of Writing', a series of lectures delivered at Emory University in 1988. Also included are a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to more extended lectures and contributions to books. In its soundings of a wide range of poets - Irish and British, American and East European, predecessors and contemporaries - Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, 'an announcement of both excitement and possession'.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, 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. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

'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