Product Description
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.
... Read more

Product Description
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.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Don't forget the Irish politics
Other reviewers have noted that Heaney's translation, like any literary translation, serves a different purpose for its audience than the original work did for its audience.I just wanted to add that this translation is not _just_ a modernization of Sophocles' work.As an Irish unionist, Heaney subtly refigures the drama as a political treatise on modern Ireland, which was prominently expressed when former Irish President Mary Robinson cited The Cure at Troy in her inaugural speech in 1994.Leave it to a master like Heaney to produce a layered work with several valid levels of interpretation.

Seamus!
"The Cure at Troy," translated by Seamus Heaney offers a delightful translation of Sophocles' "Philoctetes." With a compelling tale from anchient times layed out before him, Heaney applies colloquial speach diction to the play. This accessability offers the audience a window into the basic moral struggle occuring at the heart of the work. A finly crafted story draws the reader to the characters. A worthwhile read.

The Cure At Troy
Seamus Heaney pulls through again with his brilliant translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes.The tragic story of the forgotten hero, Philoctetes, provides a unique insight into the conflicts between personal moral beliefs and political calling.Odysseus persuades the heroic Neoptolemus into tricking the mamed Philoctetes into giving up the bow of Hercules.This act challenges the admired traits of the ancient world and draws into question the importance of personal beliefs.As each character represents a different aspect of the Greek world, a fight for beliefs - fidelity, pity, piety - endures.As for the translation itself, Heaney provides a beautiful interpretation of the story as seen in the words of the chorus:

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

This enriched translation strays slightly from the ancient text in order to enhance the understanding of the modern reader. Overall, this fast-moving play entices and enchants through a lyrical harmony like no other.Bravo, Seamus. Bravo.

The Cure at Troy yields a measured dose
Seamus Heaney's version of trials for the Greek archer entrusted with Hercules' infallible bow and arrows gives us affirmation and points of reflection.Heaney does not dash the ancient dialogue style on the rockyisland; rather it is enriched for the modern reader.Honoring thetimelessness of Sophocles, Heaney allows today's reader to make comparisonsof private nature and choices with the public need and will.The hero,Achilles' son, Neoptolemus, finds that the strategy to take Troy for theGreeks runs counter to his nature of honesty and integrity.We wrestlewith him over the choices.We tumble with him when he loses his grip. Wecrawl back to sure footing along side the hero.I found myselfunderstanding the characters based on different experiences in my life. Philoctetes bemoans his ill-fated injury which leaves him abandoned andfull of vengeance.Human empathy allows him to examine his tight grip onhis woundedness without denying what he has endured.Odysseus, thepragmatic lieutenant of war, is shown for his utility and foibles.As inall Greek plays, the chorus calls the characters and the reader toreflection, "...For my part is the chorus, and the chorus is more orless a borderline between the you and the me and the it of it." Heaney got the "it of it" for us to take our own measure. ... Read more

Product Description
This critically-acclaimed body of work brings together roughly 100 poems culled by Seamus Heaney from nine of his collections. "It is a retrospective event, by definition selective, but also full-bodied and useful."--Edward Hirsch, Boston Globe.Amazon.com Review
Seamus Heaney was the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize, and thiscollection reveals the range, sureness, and quality of hisachievements. Includes the complete and revised version of his longpoem, "Station Island," as well as a number of prose poems previouslyunpublished in the U.S. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent
Seamus Heaney is an Irish treasure in literature. His works display the "concrete reality" that he aimed for in his poetry. My favorite poem is "Digging". He is talented in fusing agric./pol./soc./religion themes together in one poem.

good portrait of Heaney's development
Heaney's "Selected Poems" shows a good picture of the poet's development up to "Station Island" and the sonnets of Glanmore and Clearances.Like Yeats, Heaney had to go through a few volumes before he "became good":except for "The Tolland Man," the poems selected from his first four collections are flat, even the much-anthologized "Digging," which perseveres in anthologies only because it illustrates Heaney's overall philosophy.With the bog poems from "North," Heaney comes into his own, and he has managed to remain at this consistent level of excellence since then. ... Read more

Product Description
"Sweeney Astray" is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work "Buile Suibhne". Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a demented flying creature at the Battle of Moira. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Magnificent
"Sweeney Astray" is a masterpiece on many levels: for the complex weave of its themes to the lyrical quality of its prose--accentuated greatly, of course, by Seamus Heaney's virtuoso translation.

We follow mad Sweeney in his crazed wanderings through the forest and hills, torn within himself by his love of the wild and his incurable loneliness. The tale is presented as chunks of narrative interspersed with segments of poetry, their quiet, melancholy beauty evoking the sounds of windsong and rain.

There is an ethereal quality to this text that makes it difficult to describe. Although it would seem to have a storyline, in reality it is a song, and each "event" a new strain of music. Sweeney's longing for his lost life as a man and king, even as he is unable to stay away from his beloved wilds of Glen Bolcain, illustrate the conflict between the desire for peaceful conformity and for transcendence. This conflict is echoed in the struggle that was ensuing in Ireland even as this work was being written, the struggle between the Celtic religion and the new influx of Christianity.

In this way does "Sweeney Astray" illuminate a historic revolution, while at the same time presenting themes that span eternity. ... Read more

Product Description
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was not only Ireland's greatest poet but one of the most influential voices in world literature in the twentieth century. His extraordinary work, in the words of this volume's editor Seamus Heaney, encourages us to be more resolutely and abundantly alive, whatever the conditions. Other volumes in this series include: "Auden", "Betjemen", "Eliot", "Hughes", and "Plath". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Beautiful book!!
I get compliments on these all of the time. The covers are a bit padded, which I did not know at the time of purchase. Beautiful design. ... Read more

Product Description
The powerful collection by the bestselling translator of Beowulf

In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air
That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold
In the everything flows and steady go of the world.
--from "Perch"

Seamus Heaney's collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world and revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least, the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding -- whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.

Electric Light ranges from short takes to conversation poems. The pre-Socratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the elegizing of friends and fellow poets. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign things their proper names; once again Heaney can be heard exting his word hoard and roll call in this, his eleventh collection.
Amazon.com Review
Seamus Heaney's 11th collection of poems, Electric Light,continues his excavation of childhood, his vivifying love of nature, andhis quest into the meaning of poetry itself in an utterly pleasurable andsatisfying 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 JosephBrodsky. Yet the urgency and optimism of new birth is a lively presencein the book too. "Bann Valley Eclogue," for example, prophesizes a timewhen "old markings / Will avail no more to keep east bank from west. / Thevalley will be washed like the new baby." And in "Out of the Bag," thechild narrator believes that newborns emerge from the doctor's bag--or, inone hallucinatory moment, from the washbasin: "The baby bits all cometogether swimming / Into his soapy big hygienic hands."

Childhood is an unfading, unfailing element in Heaney's work, and is caughtwith a breathless vitality. "The Real Names" revisits the schoolboys whoplayed Shakespeare: Owen Kelly as "Sperrins Caliban" with "turnip fists,"and "Catatonic Bobby X" as Feste, "with his curled-in shoulders andcabbage-water eyes / speechlessly rocking." Here is the humor, exactness,scope, and tenderness of Heaney at his best. His language is as muscular andinventive as ever. Idiom meets innovation in compounds like rut-shudderyand flood-slubs--and waver is neatly subverted into a noun in "Perch." Throughout Electric Light, Heaney demonstrates exactly howpoetry can capture the "flows and steady go of the world." --CherrySmyth ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Enjoyable Heaney B-sides
If Seamus Heaney was a recording artist instead of a poet, the poems of Electric Light would be B-sides: many of them are well-executed, all of them have elements of the linguistic verve and elegance for which Heaney is renowned, but none of them are stick-out spectacular.That is, if Heaney's already spectacular body of work is setting the par.
Poems such as "Montana" are concise stories that lyrically weave the nature of a person, a relationship, and the past together with lines that make good fodder for a week or two's rolling over in the mind: "Even then he was like an apparition/ A rambler from the Free State and a gambler/ All eyes as the pennies rose and slowed/ On Sunday mornings"; others, like "Perch" are meanderings into the sonic quality of words, without so much as coherent sentence: "Guzzling the Current, against it, all muscle and slur/ In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air/ That is water".But other poems are, for Heaney, largely unexceptional.
Electric Light is a good collection of poems for a lazy Sunday afternoon: there are plenty of poems to contemplate poolside, but not enough hits for this collection of b-sides to go platinum.

A solid book from a master, with a few ruminations on Beowulf
This was Heaney's first book of original verse after completing his sublime translation of Beowulf. If you love his rendering of that epic poem as much as I do, you will share my delight when you discover allusions to Beowulf and reflections on the translation process sitting snugly in poems throughout Electric Light.

not his best work
the latest collection of poetry from seamus heaney isn't his best work. in fact, if you aren't familiar with his work you'd do better starting with opened ground. there is a pensive tone throughout the collection, and the entire second half is written for recently dead poets. when you read this you can see why he won the nobel, but i'd wait to read this after you've gone through his selected poems. and here are some other poets you may enjoy: dylan thomas, yeats, robert frost, r.s. gwynn, david mason

Elegiac but powerful and affecting
With "Electric Light", Seamus Heaney steps over, or rather blurs, the boundary between poet and audience. Although some of his earlier work has dealt with poetry from the writer's perspective, numerous works in this book are addressed to, dedicated to, or in memory of (and in some cases all three) other poets. At times, this can give this collection a somewhat elegiac tone, but Heaney's powerful, careful and affecting use of the English language shines throughout, particularly in "Audenesque", which manages to be a tribute to Auden, an elegy for Joseph Brodsky, and a fine exercise in meter and rhythm all in one.

As with previous collections, Heaney's memories of his childhood and youth in Ireland are cleverly intermixed with classical allusion and earthy modern notes. Overall, the tone of "Electric Light" is darker than that of, say "The Spirit Level" (the title poem, for example, has more substance and less enticing whimsy than his previous "A Sofa in the Forties") but this merely allows moments of fun, such as his "Glosses" - ten short pieces on various subjects- "The Real Names" and "Red, White, and Blue" to stand out more clearly than they might have otherwise.

Heaney has written and spoken eloquently on the "redress of poetry"- the purpose, the need and the drive of poetry to serve as a medium of communication and conversation in the modern, larger world as well as the classical, academic one. With its juxtaposition of poetic in-jokes, everyday observation and personal but not private reminiscence, "Electric Light" strikes a kind balance between these two worlds.

Value the works of an aging poet for what they are
Visit the following URL for my review of Electric Light:

http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/heaney.htm ... Read more

Product Description

" Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's entire body of work (including his recent volumes, Seeing Things and The Spirit Level ). It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations. According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of ""the center,"" a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent review of Heaneys work with keen insight.
Daniel Tobin,published poet and Professor of English,offers exceptional insight into the work of Heaney.This book offers both an excellent overview and a fresh perspective on the deepest meaning of Heaneys poetry from 1965to the present.Tobin advances Heaney scholarship to a new level,and makesit meaningful to student and scholar alike. ... Read more

Product Description
An assessment of Heaney's poetry and prose, tracing his "contrary progressions" through phases of affirmation and despair. Hart explores Heaney's work from the 1960s to "The Haw Lantern", seeking in the poems those elements and traits that Heaney allusively indicates in his prose. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Dante's Student
"Station Island" is a series of 12 poems in the second section of the book. It follows Dante's meeting with different shades in The Divine Comedy. Heaney himself claims to be deeply influenced by Dante, and it is a Dante through TS Eliot. Although unlike TS Eliot who increasingly become religious in his work (partly due to what Dante claimed in the Divine Comedy that writing needs a transcendence and it must come from god), Heaney rejects religion as a form of transcendence.

The book must be taken as a whole and as a whole, Heaney wishes, for the first time in his career, to shake off his past literary influences and Irish writers such as James Joyce (who wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Patrick Kavanagh, and William Caleton. It is also the first time that he wishes to explain his political apathy despite his success as a poet through remarkable poems like Chekhov on Sakhalin, section VIII of "Station Island". The poems are incisive and unapologetic, like the shade of James Joyce telling Heaney to "Let go, Let fly."

However, after rejecting religion, politics and his literary past in the sequence of poems, Heaney cannot provide an answer what and why he is writing for because:

"There a drinking deer
...
at a dried-up source."

The deer of poetry has met a drought of a pool of dried-up ink. If only he could provide a kind of transcendence then this book would have been perfect.

Heaney at his best
This is still Heaney's best book of poetry to date. Centered around his 12 canto "Station Island," a poignant and disturbing 'portrait of the artist,' Station Island marked the transition in Heaney's career intothe mature artist and greatest poet writing in English that we know today.A classic book of verse, written with lyrical precision and emotionalpower.

The master at his finest
The title poem in this collection is one of the masterpieces of our day ... Read more

Product Description
Based on a lecture by poet Seamus Heaney ... Read more

Product Description
A rich body of mythology and literature has grown around the Celtic ritual known as the Feis of Tara ormarriage of sovereigntyancient ceremonies in which the future king pledges to care for the land and serve the goddess of sovereignty. Seamus Heaney has engaged this symbolic tradition in some of his most significant and controversial work. An impeccably researched and immensely readable work, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope reveals that Heaney s poetry offers a reverence for archetypal femininity and Dionysian energy that can counter the sterility and violence of postcolonial Irish life. In the tradition of poets who preceded him, Heaney turns to the marriage of sovereignty to encode a message for our times and to offer up emblems of hope on behalf of us all. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

I'm finally understanding...
For years I have been watching Seamus Heaney in interviews and wondered to myself, where does all this come from? Not a poet myself, I just intuitively felt there was much more to learn from him than I was grasping. Reading this book opened entirely new avenues of understanding for me, and Ms. Moloney obviously cares deeply for the man's work. Highly recommended!!

Hope
I have never read a book of literary criticism cover to cover before, but I found Moloney's book very readable and compelling, even.I had an interest in Ireland's history and in its relationship with England before I began, and I have always enjoyed Arthurian legend.This book correlated with much of what I knew already, filled in gaps I didn't know were there, opened up new ideas, and has sparked my desire to go further in my studies in this area. I am also a new fan of Seamus Heaney's work.I look forward to other publications by Moloney. I loved the discussion on Patricia Coughlan's ideas and wonder if there will be any response from the feminist camp.

Praying at the Water's Edge
Significant works of scholarship have a value that goes beyond research.This is such a book.Professor Moloney's thorough study of Heaney's place among Irish poets and within the Irish mythic tradition actually casts a wider net that includes all of us, embedded as we are in our conflicted sexes and societies, Irish or not.As Ms. Moloney, meticulously shows, Heaney and most other significant Irish poets have been struggling for centuries to come resolve or come to terms with a deep disconnect in the Irish past, as symbolized by the "Feis of Tara," a myth in various forms in which a hag-like mother-fertility figure must be accepted and embraced (sexually) in order to be transformed into a beautiful emblem of hope and fertility that renews a wasted land (country, Ireland).Professor Moloney's work suggests--by extention--that all of us, not just the Irish poets and people--suffer from some kind of similar disconnect and contradition, particularly in our sexual identities, and--by a further extention--in our respective political and historical contexts, regardless of what country we reside in.In short, we too are cut off--from our past, from ourselves, and from members of the opposite sex especially.We all need a reconciliation that will only come if we "effectively conquer" our "fear of the feminine," and achieve "the humility vitally required in our interaction with each other."Heaney's work, and the work of other Irish poets, is central to this imperative, healing objective--which must be achieved if the whole world is not to degenerate into something like the Irish "troubles" (i.e. Civil War) that forms the context within which Heaney is working, particularly.The solution is embodied in Heaney's quest to understand, accept, and then transcend the cultural mythology he inherited as an Ulster poet, conflicted from birth by Ireland's particular and violent disconnect.According to Moloney, Heaney "is linked utterly to his Irish past even as he argues memorably for a world beyond the post-colonial" (and post-patriarchal, if truth be told).Simply put, "it is kindness, after all" that "transforms" us, that frees us from the curses inherent in our cultural inheritances.As another Irish poet, John Montague, puts it, we need to move "beyond male condescension" and "feminist reaction," to "love's equal realm."This is why Moloney's book should be read--in addition to the fact that it also provides and introduction and insight into the work of several other significant Irish poets in addition to Heaney.It is a "hopeful" book in more ways than one.

Says Something New and Different
This is the fourth book of literary criticism on Seamus Heaney I've read so far. Moloney manages to say something new about Heaney's mythologem and places it within its context of Irish literature. I would recommend Moloney's work over the others I've read so far. ... Read more

Product Description
A poignant series of poems by one of the finest sixteenth-century Polish poets expresses the personal grief of the poet over the death of his young daughter and his growing sense of religious doubt. Reprint. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Silently Powerful
Without knowing some of the history of this work, "Laments" may seem merely a touching remembrance of the poet's daughter, whom he lost when she was only 3 years old. However, the poetic style that Kochanowski employs was reserved for those of fame and fortune, and it was considered socially unacceptable to write such a thing for a young child. Ironically, the poems still exist to this day for us to enjoy and Seamus Heaney, known for his own poetry and the recent translation of Beowulf, has rendered Kochanowski's verses in stark, simple language that conveys the rhythm, rhyme, and gravity of the poet's profound grief.

Now, Seamus Heaney's translations have always created mixed feelings in me. On one hand, Heaney is excellent at making poems seem human and not like transcendent works of words that must be studied and analyzed to be followed. On the other hand, Heaney puts much of himself into his translations and adds a presence of Irish colloquialism into the work (particularly in Beowulf). In this work, along with the aid of Stanislaw Baranczak, Heaney perfects the style that I've always known him to be capable of. The bilingual aspect will also make this edition indispensable to scholars and those attempting to learn the Polish language (and, hell, even those who can read both languages and want to compared the two(,

All in all, a vital piece of Renaissance poetry.

Beautiful, but far too smooth...
This translation is perhaps as good as they get -- it reads well, rythm and cadence are flawless. And yet, a comparison of two versions side by side serves as a useful reminder that even the best translation is merely an approximation of the original. It is also evident that sometimes very substantial compromises in content are needed to preserve the structural integrity of the poetic form.

The English text, as beautiful and touching as it is in its own right, unfortunately does not reflect the very noticeably rougher texture of the Polish original. Polish text, still mostly comprehensible to the educated Polish reader, sounds distinctly archaic, and "resists" contemporary reader's temptation to read fast, as if it deliberately tried to slow him/her down.

Alas, gone as well are many poetic devices of the original, such as clever metaphors and word plays. E.g., in the fragment of Lament 2, reproduced on the amazon website, lost is the original's play on the word "piórko" (feather) which can be both a child's toy, and a poet's quill in "Jeslim kiedy nad dziecmi piorko mial zabawic"; similarly, the contrast of the SOUND of the poet's lament and the empty SILENCE of death ("plakac nad gluchym grobem", literally "to WEEP on a SILENT grave") is awkwardly lost in an admittedly smooth sounding, and more emotional "to weep on a small daughter's grave".

The fairly unfortunate "maritime" metaphor ("Looms like cliff above some wild and rough / Shore") is perhaps more in line with the Irish or English poetic tradition, but is totally out of place in Kochanowski's poem, and it unwisely replaces a wonderfully archaic, yet entirely comprehensible, and often quoted "moja nienagrodna szkoda" (literally, and in awkwardly too many words, "my loss, which no prize shall repay").

Still, given the original's complexity, the task both translators decided to tackle must have been daunting indeed, and the result is stunningly beautiful. Despite some lost or awkward metaphors, the essential core of the work, which is its profound emotional charge, comes across as strong as in the original, and so the 5-star rating is entirely deserved.

Additionally, both poets-translators probably deserve a 6th, honorary star, for taking on an important task, several centuries overdue.

The Messenger
I discovered this collection in a Slavic Literature class where it was required.I was deeply touched by these words of a father in mourning for his daughter; feelings expressed in the 16th Century that translate as ifthey were written today.Last week I was discussing Polish literature witha Holocaust survivor.When I mentioned Kochanowski's "Treny"(Laments), she got tears in her eyes and gasped- how did I knowKochanowski?She quoted a phrase in Polish, then said she always thinksabout "Treny" when she thinks of her mother- it was her favorite-who was killed in Auschwitz.Today, when I gave her my bilingual copy, sheheld it to her heart.I could hear her heart crying when she said"thank you."Words of a daughter in mourning - and a humanconnection spanning four centuries. ... Read more

Product Description
Provides an account of Seamus Heaney's early life, and the experiences, influences and relationships - personal, literary and political - that shaped his poetic development. The result of six years' research, this book includes a considerable amount of original material including photographs, interviews, insights into possible "sources" of his poems, commentary on unpublished poems and drafts, as well as readings of each of Heaney's collections including "Seeing Things". ... Read more