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Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott--three Nobel laureates and threeof our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologiesthat surround one of America's most famous and beloved deceased poets--RobertFrost.Amazon.com Review
Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, Nobellaureates all, have written perceptive, affectionate, admiring essayson Robert Frost. Eschewing both of the prevailing caricatures of Frost(the irascible but beloved cracker-barrel philosopher and the shallowmegalomaniac), these writers pay careful attention to the poemsthemselves. They open doors into the world of words that Frostconstructed, and help readers understand the music and the ideas inthose worlds. Derek Walcott's dark reading of Frost's much-quotedclassic, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," is aloneworth the price of Homage to Robert Frost. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

This is a wonderful companion to hearing Frost's seemingly off handed reading of his material
This is a marvelous little book to be savoured at every chance and to be re-read as well. Its instructive for both the reader of poetry and the writer of poetry and every student of poetry should read this little masterpiece.It contains many insights and adds a much needed depth to the Frost that many may suspect is not there. Brodsky's erudite rendering of Frost as a student of Virgil makes me want to run back to Virgil and read other works by him besides the Aeneid and go to The Eclogues, also called Bucolics.

Brodsky's explanation of Frost's work is the best I've seen
If you need to read one critical examination of Robert Frost,buy this& read Joseph Brodsky's fantastic, accessible take on "Home Burial".What a great book this is--three fine poets examining a brilliant poet.But it is Brodsky who best holds to the Frost credo--he speaks clearly and plainly.

A glimpse into how poets read poets
Brodsky, Heaney, and Walcott helped me hear the music of Frost's poetry. They don't analyze all that many poems but the insights they offer open the door to others. For example, I learned about Frost's idea of "Sentence-Sounds" in Brodsky's review of "Home Burial" and his idea of the "Sounds of Sense" in Heaney's discussion of "Desert Places". Then when I read Frost's "To a Thinker", which does not appear in "Homage to Frost", I came across the line "...From sound to sense and back to sound", and of course I recognized a familiar theme. If you like Frost, this book makes a nice companion reader. ... Read more

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Seamus Heaney is one of the most popular Irish poets writing today, and although his critics have recognized the centrality of the language of his poetry and his pronouncements on language, these aspects of his work have received little concentrated critical attention. Berhnard O'Donoghue, himself a poet, works chronologically through Heaney's poetry -- focusing on Heaney's writing on the appropriate language of poetry and his theory of poetry and the writer's responsibility to art and politics.Covers topics such as English or Irish lyric: 60s Heaney. Phonetics and feeling: from Wintering Out to Field Work. The limbo of lost worlds: the Sweeney complex. Beyond the alphabet: The Haw Lantern; Seeing Things. Heaney's 'Ars Poetica'; Dante and The Government of the Tongue.For those interested in modern and contemporary poetry, and Irish literature. ... Read more

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This collection of 11 essays addresses the entire poetic oeuvre of Seamus Heaney up to and including "Seeing Things" and the verse-play "The Cure at Troy". The 11 contributors include poets and critics from Britain, America and Ireland. They examine a variety of aspects of Heaney's work, and open up, from various angles, the sources, directions, continuities and purposes of Heaney's career to date. Heaney has always been ready to try new things - these essays are designed to help the reader get a clearer view of the "figure in the carpet". The poetry is analyzed and assessed in its own right, but it is also discussed in relation to its literary, social and historical contexts. A spectrum of approaches is represented, from traditional humanist perspectives to those of poststructuralist, political and cultural criticism. In their concern with the values embodied in Heaney's acts of language, these essays make a contribution to the contemporary debate in Ireland. Elmer Andrews is the author of "The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper", and a contributing editor to "Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays". ... Read more

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The new anthology is designed to present a great range of poetry in a fresh and accessible way. Allowing no more than one poem, or passage of poetry, to any poet, the editors have chosen not only work from the established canon of poetry in the English language, but examples, too, from the different languages of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, arranging them by subject matter rather than chronology. The results show the same confidence of taste, breadth of interest and sheer passion that made their previous collaboration so successful. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Glorious
This collection, covering an astonishingly wide range of work from many different historical periods, should be in every library.With as many magical discoveries as old favorites.Not to be missed.

(And be sure to find The Rattle Bag as well). ... Read more

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In this thoughtful and carefully argued book, John Desmond uncovers Christian and transcendent elements in Seamus Heaney's poetry by reading it through the intellectual perspectives of the well-known poet Czeslaw Milosz and the French philosopher Simone Weil. Weil was a powerful influence on Milosz's thought and writing; Milosz, in turn, exercised considerable influence on Heaney's thought and poetry. Desmond utilizes these connections in order to show the way Weil's thought about Christianity and transcendence illuminates Heaney's complex relationship with Christianity. Desmond's sensitive readings of Heaney's poems through this new lens reveal previously unexplored depths in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning poet. ... Read more

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This book considers the way two Anglo-Irish poets, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, have used archaeology in their work, and how it surfaced in their lives. As well as providing new insights on Yeats and Heaney, their poetry and its analysis provides a filter for an original reading of the history of archaeology as it emerged from the mid-nineteenth century. Christine Finn draws on an array of data, tracing the path of the poets through museums, their childhood landscapes, and archaeological sites in Ireland, Italy and Scandinavia.
Past Poetic reveals the ways in which these two great poets received the past, as images in books and photographs, and as tangible objects. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fascinating for Literature Students and Archaeologists
This stunning, ground-breaking, punctiliously researched book considers the influence of archaeology on the work of two Irish poets to whom it was/is very important -- W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney.The section on Yeats includes fascinating details of the history of archaeology, particularly how the Greek and Roman discoveries which so captured Yeats's imagination came to be in the museums where he viewed them.Heaney is drawn not so much to classical antiquity as to the (more recent) discoveries of Bog Bodies in Ireland and Denmark (and the exact reason for the deposit of bog bodies is currently a hot topic in archaeology)."Past Poetic" is an extraordinary attempt to analyse the workings of the poetic mind.Highly recommended. ... Read more

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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 be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and the contemporary world?"

Along with 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 Heaney's finest lectures and a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to radio commentaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets -- Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors and contemporaries -- Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, "an announcement of both excitement and possession."
Amazon.com Review
In addition to his well-regarded verse, Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney has amassed a body of prose works over the last 30-plus years, previously published chiefly in three separate books. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, offers a "best of" (of sorts) as Heaney sifts through previous writings and offers a variety of strong works, from memoir to lecture transcripts to literary criticism.

Long regarded as one of Northern Ireland's premier contemporary poets, this volume shows us that Heaney has a sharp critical eye as well, giving us probing analyses of his literary mentors (such as William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and W.B. Yeats), European poets (Edwin Muir, Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes to name but a few), and other prominent European and American poets (T.S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, Sylvia Plath). Additionally, Heaney includes pieces on the writing process and his evolution as a writer that are insightful and engaging. In "Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland," Heaney describes what the poet sets out to achieve:

In that liberated moment when the lyric discovers its buoyant completion, when the timeless formal pleasure comes to its fullness and exhaustion, in those moments of self-justification and self-obliteration the poet makes contact with the plane of consciousness where he is at once intensified in his being and detached from his predicaments.

Whether you're a fan of Heaney's poems or not, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 is an excellent critical resource--one into which it is well worth digging. --Michael Ferch ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An Excellent Collection
As a person of Irish descent, I am especially proud of Seamus Heaney's contribution to poetry and literature study.His voice is uniquely Northern Irish, but his understanding of that which makes language and literature deep spans the world--its ages and cultures.With a poet's vision, Heaney latches onto the resonance of words and images that explicate the human experience, in Icelandic sagas, Dante's verse, Milosz, or fellow Irish writers.

Heaney's aim in this collection of prose writings (some have been previously published and some are lectures) is to "celebrate and take possession" of poetry's excitement and exuberance.Each piece is autobiographical, in that his approach is not strictly the performance of formal literary criticism, but is rather the creative sojourn a poet can take into the depths of his own craft, to call the poetic spirit home.As he says, his central preoccupations are: 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 his contemporary world?

Heaney's leading article is "Mossbawn," which describes the County Derry in the 1940's--as an 'omphalos' or navel which marks the center of the world--whereby one gets the sense that Heaney is a young Stephen Dedalus attempting to locate himself in Ireland, his community, and the world at large.His sentences are rich and carefully worded to evoke just the proper provincial image.He talks about his first forays in reading literature, rhymes, and the formidable Byron and Keats.

The next piece, "from Feeling Into Words" talks about the craft of writing poetry--his "Digging"--lines from Wordsworth.The next articles in Section I are interesting and special--on T.S. Eliot, living in Belfast and No. Ireland, being an Irish student and writer who writes in an English language.

Section two engages various interests: English writers and poets, Yeats, No. Irish poets and poetry, Kavanagh, P. Larkin, Dante and modern poetry, Z. Herbert, W.H. Auden, R. Lowell, S. Plath, Kinsella, E. Muir, Marlowe, John Clare, H. MacDiarmid, D. Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle...," E. Bishop, and R. Burns.

Section Three: S. Smith, Calvino's "Mr. Palomar" (an excellent book and review of it), Norman MacCaig, Ted Hughes, and C. Milosz (who writes marvelous verse).

This is a superb collection.I also recommend Heaney's meditations on Frost.He always attempts to uncover--to 'dig into'--features in poetry that make it 'good,' and in so doing, he immerses himself in a loved craft and discipline, to create vibrant, poetic prose.One gets the feeling here that Heaney is showing-off his 'finders keepers' treasures--his favorites--his cherished agate marbles, which clink and rattle in a bag of sensuous word play.

A Five-Hundred Pound Gorilla of Poetry
I'm a fan of Heaney's poems, but I'm very uncomfortable with his status as a "major" literary figure on the world stage. The title of this book says it all. Heaney's career, as poet as well as critic, has consisted entirely of finding and keeping--rarely of making. He has been very successful at appropriating and synthesizing the ideas and techniques of others (esp. Lowell, Hopkins and Yeats) into a satisfying if never very original whole. In choosing this title, he apparently now sees fit to congratulate himself for it. Originality may not be the highest quality--how many are ever truly original?--but somebody of Heaney's prominence ought to do more than just recycle the successes of admired precursors. "Finders Keepers" would be an apt name for his collected works as well, and far more honest than what it's actually called--"Opened Ground." In addition to the influence of the perennially confused Swedes, I think Heaney's outsized success is largely due to his comforting conformity to easily recognizable tradition--critics, especially those of a conservative bent, eat this kind of stuff up. If you want to read a real innovator, also Irish, who really opens ground--and for that reason will never have "Winner of the Nobel Prize" trumpeted across her covers--check out Medbh McGuckian. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Wintering Out
Wintering Out
Paperback
68 pages
Published by: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 9780571101580

When I read Fodder, Bog Oak, and Anahorish, with their language that almost breathes the rural landscape and its activities it is hard to imagine that Heaney was writing and publishing Wintering Out in 1971 and 1972, the years of McGurk's bar, Ballymurphy, and Bloody Sunday marking a sad high point for the Northern Irish Troubles, which in `72 alone saw 500 people killed.

Those first three poems give away nothing about the poems later in the book that open the ground beneath the reader to expose an ethno-political conflict and its deep effect on Heaney's writing in these years. The opening trilogy of Wintering Out is a slow moving portrait of an unsentimental rural life short of romantic pastoralism and full of cultural context and meaning for both poet and dwellers.

"With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills."

This is Anahorish, Heaney's `place of clear water', his childhood landscape around Mossbawn, where the inhabitants take on a quality through their working relationship with the landscape that for a second almost makes them collude with mythical mound-dwellers. At first this was just raw poetic beauty, but once I moved further into Wintering Out these images - created with the nouns and the place names of the land, Heaney's precision tools - started to make more sense as acts of place-making that tried to move away from the ethno-essentialization of Heaney's immediate present and show a bond between people and their landscape which has nothing to do with religion or other cultural vanities.

Wintering Out goes beyond the short scope of historical thinking of Heaney's countrymen to relocate a past much bigger, buried in the bogs of Ireland, which Heaney make emblematic of Irish identity and belonging. From the depths of bogs he draws his inspiration to write about a lifeworld where drizzle, mist, peat, moss, grass, rushes, cattle, and rivers dominate, but where "The softening ruts / lead back to no / `oak groves', no / cutters of mistletoe / in the clearings".

No sentimental gazes into a misty past here. It is not the country of current Troubles in which you live so much in the past that it has become a country of the past, rather it is a past dug up from bogs in both Denmark (in the poem The Tollund Man) and Ireland, which you can speak, name, place. And speaking the Irish words is a theme Heaney again and again explores in Wintering Out, both directly by emphasizing the vowel sounds and the guttural consonants, but also more subtly, like in Land IV:

"The tawny guttural water
speaks itself: Moyola
is its own score and consort,

bedding the locale
in the utterance"

Language shapes experience, and by speaking the place-names out loud we shape our surroundings in the process. We bed our locales. Yet, not everyone can just speak up and make the same meaning out of it. I think what lifts Heaney out of a mere poetry of places and people and into something else, into a poetry of human experience, a kind of phenomenology without the heavy going of continental philosophers on its back, is his ability to show in ever so few words how lifeworlds can be made and re-made by speaking about them. Paraphrasing the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld I'd say that Heaney can show what cultural intimacy means in just one sentence running through the length of three short verses in the celebrated poem Broagh:

"The garden mould
bruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the black O

in Broagh,
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades

ended almost
suddenly, like that last
gh the strangers found
difficult to manage."

Here is no doubt that more is at stake than pronunciations and the position of the tongue. In "A New Song" this is further explored when certain vowel sounds are made symbolic of the Irish language, while demesnes - the lands owned by feudal lords - hide out in the consonants. Heaney seems to urge people to move away from the Crown English and stay with the Irish sounds like they stay in Ireland on land that has been reclaimed from the old invader and is now growing green again "Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass".

These comments on unwanted English presence also mark the gliding transitions in Wintering Out that occur along the way as Heaney becomes more direct in his references to the Troubles and his struggles to understand them, or at least to understand himself in relation to them.

While poems like A Northern Hoard can be read as laments of armed conflict, and Heaney's own sense of inability to do much about it apart from writing about it, these parts of Wintering Out are also the ones that touch me the least. They become almost too outpsoken,direct and therefore slightly bland. But that is only in comparison with the splendor of the rest. I simply prefer his explorations of the things that work as prismatic reflections of the Troubles, like the trickster and outcast portraits of The Last Mummer, Servant Boy (who is "wintering out / the back-end of a bad year"), and Cairn-Maker that all tread paths which harbour no feelings for either of the warring sides but work to show potential alternatives to the present.

Moving into Part II of Wintering Out I would call a large part of these the anthropological poems. In a sense the whole book could be called that (couldn't all Heaney's poetry?), being one long social excavation. Wedding Day, Mother of the Groom and A Winter's Tale all explore customs, rituals, and life on the periphery of local communities that can only tolerate so much divergence from the paths of bounded culture.

They deal in some way with rites of passage or liminal states, a theme most clearly outlined in two poems: Shorewoman which works to remind me of the outcasts figures of North Atlantic stories, the men who were forced or voluntarily took to the hills and lived shadow existences there - and like here where it is a woman "walking the firm margin" at the shoreline instead. And Limbo, whose title gives it away, and in which the mother's drowning of an illegitimate child creates a rite for her passing back into the gated fold of community moral life:

"Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I'm sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ's palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there."

So much more could be said about these poems than I am able to. Scores of books exist in which learned people give their own interpretations of Heaney's peotry, and while I have just briefly touched upon a few of the themes in Wintering Out that I found the most fascinating, I would suggest to anyone to take the time and enjoy this marvellous collection of poetry. Anyone can read this, really, since anyone will thread their own line of meaning through the words. But I doubt that there will be anyone left untouched by the beauty of the poems
... Read more

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In this collection of critical responses to Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney´s poetry, Elmer Andrews presents the debates surrounding the poet´s work and popular appeal. The writings gathered in this Columbia Critical Guide clarify and explore issues of cultural identity and nationality, as well as debates on the power of language and the function of verse. Beginning with Heaney´s early collection, Death of a Naturalist, the guide reviews and contextualizes material on successive volumes (including 1996´s The Spirit Level), so that students of Heaney´s verse will find an accessible pathway through the most important critical writings on this major poet. ... Read more

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Eugene O'Brien's critical study examines the attitudetoward place and home in the works of Seamus Heaney. He looks at thepolitical role of Heaney's writing and argues that his complexengagement with these issues creates a pluralist and emancipatorysense of Irish identity predicated on the future rather than mired inthe past.

O'Brien's is the first book to trace an isolated theme in Heaney's work, in this case its creation of a politics of place, language, and identity. Unlike chronological studies of Heaney's poetry, O'Brien explores important elements in his entire oeuvre, from his poetry and prose to translations, such as the recent best-selling edition of Beowulf, that relate to the issue of writing and identity--strident nationalism, tribal identification, political ideology, and postcolonial poetics in particular. The first sustained engagement between literary theory and the work of Heaney, the book connects the ethical projects of Heaney and Derrida in terms of their views on the relationship between self and other, and between the present and the past.

O'Brien's close reading of Heaney's poems results in a wealth of original arguments; for example, his examination of the Irish poet's most famous book, North, views it as opening a dialogue with other traditions. Another unique emphasis is on the Viking influence on his work. Finally, O'Brien examines the relationship between Heaney's texts and the violence in Northern Ireland that has been the environment of much of his writing.

The most contemporary study of Heaney's writings to date--it extends to Electric Light and The Midnight Verdict--this book weaves critical theory and criticism, breaking with previous scholarship to present a reading of Heaney that extends far beyond moments of inspiration and symbolism to reach the very notion of identity and the individual's relationship to the past and present. ... Read more

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Delivered while Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, these lectures cover subjects as diverse as Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and Marlowe's "Hero and Leander", as well as work by Yeats, Larkin and Dylan Thomas. ... Read more

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Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides. ... Read more

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Thomas Flanagan — winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction — once wrote, "It is not the romantic, rather sentimental Ireland of many Irish-Americans that I love, but the actual Ireland, a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark." In these essays, Flanagan reflects on journeys through his own favorite parts of Ireland, past and present Irish history, and writers such as Yeats, O’Neill, Brian Moore, and John O’Hara, as well as Fitzgerald and Hemingway. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Intelligent gush, but gush all the same
There are scholars and there are critics, and then there are enthusiasts: Thomas Flangan falls somewhat into the latter camp. While this collection of pieces on Irish and Irish-American cultural figures he wrote for The New York Review of Books is often quite fine and imaginative, at times Flanagan is severely hampered by his inability to maintain a critical distance from his subjects,especially when it's someone he greatly admires, like John Ford or James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first two may be worthy of such high and unadulterated praise, but Fitzgerald? Even when dispelling popular myths about the latter, Flanagan has trouble reining in the gush, e.g. on THE GREAT GATSBY's status as a novel about the American Dream, Flanagan writes, "Scholars exchange their learned articles on the subject, and generations of college freshmen are told about it. If you whispered into a reader's sleeping ear the words 'Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY,' she would murmur drowsily, 'and the corruption of the American dream.'"

There's a pretty unhelpful introduction by Seamus Heaney that's more of a personal memoir of Flanagan than a way to orient oneself with regard to Flanagan's writings. ... Read more

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The poet's first book.
The review blurbs are descriptive enough. ... Read more