Heaney, Seamus 1939-

Beowulf : a new verse translation ( Book )
26 editions published between 1998 and 2010 in English and held by 3,288 libraries worldwide
Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, 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 end of the twentieth century, 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.

Opened ground : selected poems, 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
3 editions published between 1998 and 1999 in English and held by 1,683 libraries worldwide
Selected poems by the Nobel Prizewinning Irish poet are taken from Heaney's twelve previous collections and includes work published since 1987. This volume gathers the landmark poems from the poets twelve previous collections, & brings the reader up to date with the work published since 1987. Annotation. As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."

Station Island by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
13 editions published between 1984 and 2009 in 3 languages and held by 1,616 libraries worldwide
Contains the title poem, a section of meditative lyrics, and a third group of poems concerned with a king of Ulster, the legendary Sweeney.

The spirit level by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
26 editions published between 1996 and 2009 in 6 languages and held by 1,589 libraries worldwide
In this collection, as ever with Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects -- a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing -- are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert, and completely truthful.

Electric light by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
18 editions published between 2000 and 2009 in 4 languages and held by 1,472 libraries worldwide
From the bestselling translator of "Beowulf" comes a new collection of short takes and conversational poems recollecting his childhood in Ireland.

District and circle by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
12 editions published between 2005 and 2009 in English and Spanish and held by 1,344 libraries worldwide
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. --Publisher.

Field work : [poems by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
19 editions published between 1978 and 2009 in English and Galician and held by 1,324 libraries worldwide

The redress of poetry by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
10 editions published between 1990 and 2008 in 3 languages and held by 1,290 libraries worldwide
The ten lectures reprinted [in this book] were first delivered in the course of [the author's] tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1989 and 1994.-Pref.

Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001 by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
8 editions published between 2002 and 2003 in English and Polish and held by 1,205 libraries worldwide
From the Publisher: A selection of the best of three decades of writing about poetry, a celebration of the "tenacious curiosity" (Los Angeles Times) of the Nobel laureate. 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 his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage, and the contemporary world?" Along with a selection from Heaney's three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue, and The Redress of Poetry), the present volume includes a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in books, ranging from formal lectures to radio commentaries about the rural Ireland of his childhood to illuminating reviews of his contemporaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets-Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors, fellows, and successors-Finders Keepers becomes, as its title heralds, "an announcement of both excitement and possession."

Human chain by Seamus Heaney ( Book )
6 editions published between 2010 and 2011 in English and held by 1,089 libraries worldwide
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.