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Seamus Heaney
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Beowulf: An Illustrated Editionby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374111197 (0-374-11119-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition'Book summary:In Beowulf warriors must back up their mead-hall boasts with instant action, monsters abound, and fights are always to the death. The Anglo-Saxon epic, composed between the 7th and 10th centuries, has long been accorded its place in literature, though its hold on our imagination has been less secure. In the introduction to his translation, Seamus Heaney argues that Beowulf's role as a required text for many English students obscured its mysteries and "mythic potency." Now, thanks to the Irish poet's marvelous recreation (in both senses of the word) under Alfred David's watch, this dark, doom-ridden work gets its day in the sun.
There are endless pleasures in Heaney's analysis, but readers should head straight for the poem and then to the prose. (Some will also take advantage of the dual-language edition and do some linguistic teasing out of their own.) The epic's outlines seem simple, depicting Beowulf's three key battles with the scaliest brutes in all of art: Grendel, Grendel's mother (who's in a suitably monstrous snit after her son's dismemberment and death), and then, 50 years later, a gold-hoarding dragon "threatening the night sky / with streamers of fire." Along the way, however, we are treated to flashes back and forward and to a world view in which a thane's allegiance to his lord and to God is absolute. In the first fight, the man from Geatland must travel to Denmark to take on the "shadow-stalker" terrorizing Heorot Hall. Here Beowulf and company set sail:
Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank,
After a fearsome night victory over march-haunting and heath-marauding Grendel, our high-born hero is suitably strewn with gold and praise, the queen declaring: "Your sway is wide as the wind's home, / as the sea around cliffs." Few will disagree. And remember, Beowulf has two more trials to undergo.
sand churned in the surf, warriors loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining war-gear
in the vessel's hold, then heaved out,
away with a will in their wood-wreathed ship.
Over the waves, with the wind behind her
and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird...Heaney claims that when he began his translation it all too often seemed "like trying to bring down a megalith with a toy hammer." The poem's challenges are many: its strong four-stress line, heavy alliteration, and profusion of kennings could have been daunting. (The sea is, among other things, "the whale-road," the sun is "the world's candle," and Beowulf's third opponent is a "vile sky-winger." When it came to over-the-top compound phrases, the temptations must have been endless, but for the most part, Heaney smiles, he "called a sword a sword.") Yet there are few signs of effort in the poet's Englishing. Heaney varies his lines with ease, offering up stirring dialogue, action, and description while not stinting on the epic's mix of fate and fear. After Grendel's misbegotten mother comes to call, the king's evocation of her haunted home may strike dread into the hearts of men and beasts, but it's a gift to the reader:
A few miles from here
In Heaney's hands, the poem's apparent archaisms and Anglo-Saxon attitudes--its formality, blood-feuds, and insane courage--turn the art of an ancient island nation into world literature. --Kerry Fried [via]
a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
the hart in flight from pursuing hounds
will turn to face them with firm-set horns
and die in the wood rather than dive
beneath its surface. That is no good place.More editions of Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition:
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The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigoneby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374117217 (0-374-11721-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone'Book summary:Sophocles' play, first staged in the fifth century B.C., stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides of the battle. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all of her close kin. Enraged, Creon condemns her to death, and his soldiers wall her up in a tomb. While Creon eventually agrees to Antigone's release, it is too late: She takes her own life, initiating a tragic repetition of events in her family's history.[via]
In this outstanding new translation, commissioned by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary, Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles' masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.More editions of The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone:
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Crediting Poetry : The Nobel Lectureby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374131384 (0-374-13138-4)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crediting Poetry : The Nobel Lecture'Book summary:er 10, 1995. His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics. [via]
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The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetesby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374133557 (0-374-13355-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes'Book summary:[via]The Cure at Troy is Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. Written in the fifth century BC, this play concerns the predicament of the outcast hero, Philoctetes, whom the Greeks marooned on the island of Lemnos and forgot about until the closing stages of the Siege of Troy. Abandoned because of a wounded foot, Philoctetes nevertheless possesses an invincible bow without which the Greeks cannot win the Trojan War. They are forced to return to Lemnos and seek out Philoctetes' support in a drama that explores the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency.
Heaney's version of Philoctetes is a fast-paced, brilliant work ideally suited to the stage. Heaney holds on to the majesty of the Greek original, but manages to give his verse the flavor of Irish speech and context.More editions of The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes:
Diary of One Who Vanished: A Song Cycleby Seamus Heaney , Leos Janacek, Ozef KaldaISBN 0374139237 (0-374-13923-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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District And Circleby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374140928 (0-374-14092-8)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Electric Lightby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374146837 (0-374-14683-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Electric Light'Book summary:Seamus Heaney's 11th collection of poems, Electric Light, continues his excavation of childhood, his vivifying love of nature, and his quest into the meaning of poetry itself in an utterly pleasurable and satisfying way. As the poet squares up to his own mortality, many of the poems are dedicated to the memory of lost friends and poets like Joseph Brodsky. Yet the urgency and optimism of new birth is a lively presence in the book too. "Bann Valley Eclogue," for example, prophesizes a time when "old markings / Will avail no more to keep east bank from west. / The valley will be washed like the new baby." And in "Out of the Bag," the child narrator believes that newborns emerge from the doctor's bag--or, in one hallucinatory moment, from the washbasin: "The baby bits all come together swimming / Into his soapy big hygienic hands."
Childhood is an unfading, unfailing element in Heaney's work, and is caught with a breathless vitality. "The Real Names" revisits the schoolboys who played Shakespeare: Owen Kelly as "Sperrins Caliban" with "turnip fists," and "Catatonic Bobby X" as Feste, "with his curled-in shoulders and cabbage-water eyes / speechlessly rocking." Here is the humor, exactness, scope, and tenderness of Heaney at his best. His language is as muscular and inventive as ever. Idiom meets innovation in compounds like rut-shuddery and flood-slubs--and waver is neatly subverted into a noun in "Perch." Throughout Electric Light, Heaney demonstrates exactly how poetry can capture the "flows and steady go of the world." --Cherry Smyth [via]
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Enchantress: Marthe Bibesco and Her Worldby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374148147 (0-374-14814-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Essential Wordsworthby William Wordsworth, Seamus HeaneyISBN 006088861X (0-06-088861-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Essential Wordsworth'Book summary:From the introduction by Seamus Heaney:
Wordsworth's power over us stems from the manifest strength of his efforts to integrate several strenuous and potentially contradictory efforts. Indeed, it is not until Yeats that we encounter another poet in whom emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, political awareness, artistic self-knowledge and bardic representativeness are so truly and responsibly combined.
He is an indispensable figure in the evolution of modern, a finder and keeper of the self as subject, a theorist and apologist whose preface to Lyrical Ballads 1802 remains definitive.
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Field Workby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374154821 (0-374-15482-1)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus, Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Field Work'Book summary:Field Work, which first appeared in 1979, is a superb collection of lyrics and narrative poems from one of the literary masters of our time. As the critic Dennis Donoghue wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "In 1938, not a moment too soon, W. B. Yeats admonished his colleagues: 'Irish poets, learn your trade.' Seamus Heaney, born the following year, has learned his trade so well that it is now a second nature wonderfully responsive to his first. And the proof is in Field Work, a superb book . . . [This is] a perennial poetry offered at a time when many of us have despaired of seeing such a thing."Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His recent translations include Beowulf and Diary of One Who Vanished; his recent poetry collections include Opened Ground and Electric Light.Field Work, which first appeared in 1979, is a superb collection of lyrics and narrative poems from one of the literary masters of our time. As the critic Dennis Donoghue wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "In 1938, not a moment too soon, W. B. Yeats admonished his colleagues: 'Irish poets, learn your trade.' Seamus Heaney, born the following year, has learned his trade so well that it is now a second nature wonderfully responsive to his first. And the proof is in Field Work, a superb book . . . [This is] a perennial poetry offered at a time when many of us have despaired of seeing such a thing.""Heaney is keyed and pitched unlike any significant poet now at work in the language, anywhere."Harold Bloom, The Times Literary Supplement[via]
"For all the qualities I list, the most important is song [and] the tune Heaney sings [is] poetry's tune, resolutions of cherished language."Donald Hall, The NationMore editions of Field Work:
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971 to 2001by Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374154961 (0-374-15496-1)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Fire I' the Flint: Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkinsby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0197257259 (0-19-725725-9)
Hardcover, Oxford University Press
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The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978-1987by Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374165785 (0-374-16578-5)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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The Haw Lanternby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374168385 (0-374-16838-5)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Haw Lanternby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374168377 (0-374-16837-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Homage to Robert Frostby Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374172463 (0-374-17246-3)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Lamentsby Jan Kochanowski, Stanislaw Baranczak, Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374182906 (0-374-18290-6)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Laments'Book summary:The work of one of the greatest poets of the sixteenth century, Laments has been beautifully rendered by contemporary poets Stanislaw Baranczak and Seamus Heaney. This poignant series of poems on the death of Kochanowski's young daughter is surprisingly intimate and domestic in nature, expressing a candid grief and an undeniably modern sense of humiliation and religious doubt.[via]More editions of Laments:
New Poems: A P.E.N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetryby Alan Brownjohn, Seamus Heaney , Jon StallworthyISBN 0091067707 (0-09-106770-7)
Hardcover, Random House
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North: [poems]by Seamus HeaneyISBN 0195198468 (0-19-519846-8)
Hardcover, Oxford University Press
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Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996by Seamus HeaneyISBN 0374235171 (0-374-23517-1)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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The Poetry of Seamus Heaneyby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0231119275 (0-231-11927-5)
Softcover, Columbia Univ Pr
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Redress of Poetry: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford Oct 24 1989by Seamus HeaneyISBN 0199513325 (0-19-951332-5)
Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr
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Seamus Heaneyby Michael Allen, Seamus HeaneyISBN 031216503X (0-312-16503-X)
Softcover, Palgrave Macmillan
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Seamus Heaneyby Michael Allen, Seamus HeaneyISBN 0335152619 (0-335-15261-9)
Softcover, McGraw-Hill
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Selected Poems: 1931 - 2004by Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus HeaneyISBN 0060188677 (0-06-018867-7)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Poems: 1931 - 2004'Book summary:One of the centurys most important poets.
San Francisco ChronicleOne of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.
Joseph BrodskyNobody tells the story of this age better than Czeslaw Milosz.
New RepublicCommemorating the centenary year of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems 1934 - 2004 is a sterling collection of some of the finest works of one the most revered poets of our timeincluding more than forty later poems new to this edition and never before published in English. Selected and Last Poems is a perfect introduction for poetry readers who might still be unfamiliar with this literary giants monumental body of work.
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The Spirit Level: Poemsby Seamus HeaneyISBN 014086413X (0-14-086413-X)
Hardcover, Penguin/Highbridge
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Wintering Outby Seamus HeaneyISBN 0195197208 (0-19-519720-8)
Hardcover, Oxford University Press
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