Seamus Heaney - Böcker

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'.

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).

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.

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

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 Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

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

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