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Offers a brief profile of the Irish poet, examines the major themes running through his works, and assesses his place in modern literature. ... Read more

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Meg Tyler here presents a formal analysis which comprises close readings of Seamus Heaney's poetry; whose work, in an era of fractured poetry, stands out as it strives towards unity and regeneration. "A Singing Contest" is a welcome return to the practice of close reading and formal analysis at it moves away from the highly-politicized theoretical readings of literature that have inundated literary studies over the two decades. By a detailed structural analysis of diction, meter, imagery and generic form, Tyler illustrates how Heaney's poems create concords from discord and unities from fracture. She considers the interplay between different kinds of literary tradition and community in his poetry. Incorporating readings of Heaney's elegies, pastoral eclogues and sonnets, "A Singing Contest" will serve undergraduates of all levels as an excellent introduction to formal analysis and close reading, and graduate students as a model of formal analysis. ... Read more

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This book is a study of the poetry of Seamus Heaney collected in his volume Opened Ground, in which the poems are read in Jungian terms.Heaney had referred to himself asJungian in religionand naturally used terms such asinitiation ,individuationand theunconsciousin interviews and essays.Therefore, key Jungian terms are examined in relation to Heaney s poetic expression of these and explored through at least one poem from each of the collections represented in Opened Ground.This allows for an exploration of the creative tensions involved in the poet s presentation of personal, poetic and political concerns, while also allowing for further examination of the powerful physicality and musical qualities of the language in which he luxuriates. ... Read more

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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Plays by Brian Friel, Plays by Marie Jones, Plays by Seamus Heaney, Dancing at Lughnasa, Translations, Philadelphia Here I Come!, Stones in His Pockets, the Home Place, Faith Healer, the Freedom of the City, Lovers, Living Quarters, the Burial at Thebes, Molly Sweeney, Making History, the Cure at Troy. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt:Dancing at Lughnasa Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland 's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator . He recounts the summer in his aunts' cottage when he was seven years old.This play is loosely based on the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in the Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal. Set in 1936, during the summer before de Valera 's new constitution was approved by referendum, the play depicts the late summer days when love briefly seems possible for three of the Mundy sisters (Chris, Rose, and Kate) and the family welcomes home the frail elder brother, who has returned from a life as missionary in Africa. However, as the summer ends, the family foresees the sadness and economic privations under which they will suffer as all hopes fade.The play takes place in early August, around the festival of Lughnasa , in Celtic folklore , the festival of the first fruits, when the harvest is welcomed. The play describes a bitter harvest for the Mundy sisters, a time of reaping what has been sown.Plot synopsis The five Mundy sisters (Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rosie, and Christina), all unmarried, live in a cottage outside of Ballybeg. The oldest, Kate, is a school teacher , and the only one with a well-paid job. Agnes and Rose knit gloves to be sold in town, thereby earning... ... Read more

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This monograph discusses a critical element in the early poetry of Seamus Heaney: the question of poetic duty and responsibility with specific reference to the poetry he published before moving from Ulster to the relative safety of the Irish Republic. The work seeks to demonstrate how the first four poetry collections by Heaney exhibit a progression in how the poet,after coming to grips with his artistic vocation, finally discovers the means by which to address the terrible events that afflicted Northern Ireland at the time. The very first poem in Death of a Naturalist informs us that Heaney is fully committed to the use of the pen to 'dig'(DN1)into all that constitutes his country. Besides other things, this is a declaration by someone willing to do something about the problems of his community. However, the aim of this study is to show how difficult and ,at times, burdensome the artistic call has been for Heaney. The first to collections give a picture of a budding poet developing a style of his own,as well as creating in his mind the conception of the poet's figure as some sort of diviner,shaman tapping the unknown and retrieving wisdom for his people. We come to see how the image of darkness is used as a symbol of the Jungian collective unconsciousness to which the poet has special means of access. Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark lay the foundations for the poet's engagement with 'external reality'(OG449)in Heaney's future collections. Wintering Out focuses primarily on the question of the Irish Language and investigates the problems elicited by the poet's use of the English language as a poetic medium. In North, Heaney grapples with the dilemma of how best to respond to Northern Ireland's political and religious climate,the dilemma of whether one should use the 'symbolic' or 'explicit' mode of poetry-writing. Xerri does a remarkable job detailing the poems in the first four collections of Heaney as well as considering his critical writing and the relationship between poet and his vocation. Heaney does make the issue of the poet's responsibility an issue in his early work and he does,as he must, seek a way to break free of too deep a concern with the savage pettiness,brutality and division that has consumed too many in its hard dark violent spiral R.L. Hanna,North American Literary Review Irish Research Series,No.59 Market: Seamus Heaney, Modern Irish Poetry, Poetry ,Irish Studies,Ulster ,Poetics, Critical Studies/ Poetry of Ireland, Irish Poets ... Read more

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Seamus Heaney is the foremost Irish poet since Yeats and one of the most popular poets writing in English today. The poetry and criticism of the Nobel Prize Winner are of indisputable importance to contemporary literature, his influence growing with each new work. This fourth edition of The Art of Seamus Heaney is the latest in a series of ongoing critical responses to Heaney's work. It adds new essays on Heaney's most recent books by critics, Tim Kendall, John Goodby and Helen Phillips, to those by Helen Vendler, Douglas Dunn, Edna Longley, Anne Stevenson, Bernard O'Donoghue, Philip Hobsbaum and Ciaran Carson among others. The book also features the facsimiles of the drafts of "North"-one of Heaney's most important early poems-which allow the reader to follow its development. ... Read more

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Defending Poetry studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet-critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. It begins with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas and continues by situating these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also as drastically other.This otherness is bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career-long contemplation of the ideal of poetic 'integrity', and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry. ... Read more

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In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Frazier's dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people, resources, and services are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier's arresting photographs take us into Iowa's abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals: Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer, Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier's camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.

This collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier's photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier's stunning images evoke the brilliance of Robert Frank's The Americans. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

beautiful pictures
They are depressing pictures. definitely if you were to take color photos in the spring and summer there would be a much different mood.it conveys sadness for a corner of the world which seems to be slowly dying away.the pictures really got at the core of what it means to be iowan, the snow and cold that you just deal with, the openess-- land that goes on forever with nothing hidden, the partying and drinking on one handand the amish on the other, the humility and lack of pretense of the people.

Driftless
Danny Wilcox Frazier's book of photographs, Driftless, is just that. The reportage/documentary style body of images is an aimless collection of photographs tethered together by the vague theme of "Iowa." Some are excellent, many are poor. There are many pictures that capture an utterly indecisive moment, causing one to wonder what its purpose in the book is. Nothing in the volume totally blew me away. Furthermore, the quality of the printing feels flimsy and the layout, with a combination of full bleed two-page spreads and smaller pictures vertically off-set on opposite pages, leaves a lot to be desired.

Oh, Iowa, you break my heart
Full disclosure: I am not qualified to write this review.I haven't really, thoughtfully perused the book yet...

Opposing argument: ...but the damn thing's been sitting on my coffee table since Christmas, and if it had looked more engaging to me when my husband (a devout Hawkeye) flipped through it after he unwrapped it, I'd have torn through that mofo three weeks ago.

I hate, hate, hate to say this about the work of someone from the clean, pure state of Iowa.But, the images struck me as depressing.And maybe that's the point!It's art, right?But then, plenty of National Geographic photos are bleak in nature without making you want to die a faster death.

My husband's only words: This cost 27 dollars?It seems a tad thin for 27 dollars.

Best Photo Book of '07
The sugar-coated, romanticized, or one dimensional view of "Middle-America" would have us believe that Iowa is only a land of covered bridges, fields of dreams, or over weight mall moms casting their red state ballots.But the world where Danny Wilcox Frazier lives is the real deal, and he explores it deeply with his camera in ways that are never sentimental and trite or judgemental and cruel. He finds stunning beauty and intrigue in the daily lives of real Iowans around him.

This is the most powerful collection of photography released in 2007. ... Read more