Call number
811 HEA
Collection
Publication
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2014), Edition: Reissue, 256 pages
Description
A selection of poems by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, drawn from throughout the first twenty-one years of his career, from 1966 to 1987.
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member soniaandree
To be honest, I really enjoyed Heaney's poetry: there is a strong imagery in each of his poems, a sense of 'belonging' to a land and its rural roots. I do not know why I have avoided his poetry until my Lit degree course required it, because Irish life, history and culture are evident in the way
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that Heaney treats his themes. In the end, I have felt many affinities in a lot of his poems because they made me remember my rural roots and childhood in Aveyron, and, like life itself, poetry evolves with age and maturity. Like a good wine, he achieves a mosaic of complex emotions and styles. This is a very good read and I especially recommend this book to people who were raised in the countryside and/or who have lived in close-knit rural communities. Show Less
LibraryThing member sonofcarc
I had not read any new poetry to speak of in many, many years. More fool I. Seamus Heaney was the Real Thing; he takes his place among my top echelon, with Yeats, Frost, and Herbert. I cannot overstate my enthusiasm for this book; I will be going out immediately to find the rest of Heaney's
One thing that strikes me forcibly about the early poems in this volume is how much they are rooted in the Old English and Old Norse tradition. I have barely scratched the surface of commentary on Heaney's work, but I suspect this is widely overlooked due to a journalistic preoccupation with Ireland and its Troubles -- which is obviously a central subject. The metric form of the early work, with its two-stress half-lines is derived from the traditional Germanic verse form, though the alliteration is mainly dropped. Heaney openly acknowledges this in "Bone Dreams," where he writes of "pushing back"
to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.
And the poems are full of allusions to Norse saga and Old English literature -- I am fortunate enough to have the background to pick up those references, I would love to be able to help those who don't.
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work.One thing that strikes me forcibly about the early poems in this volume is how much they are rooted in the Old English and Old Norse tradition. I have barely scratched the surface of commentary on Heaney's work, but I suspect this is widely overlooked due to a journalistic preoccupation with Ireland and its Troubles -- which is obviously a central subject. The metric form of the early work, with its two-stress half-lines is derived from the traditional Germanic verse form, though the alliteration is mainly dropped. Heaney openly acknowledges this in "Bone Dreams," where he writes of "pushing back"
to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.
And the poems are full of allusions to Norse saga and Old English literature -- I am fortunate enough to have the background to pick up those references, I would love to be able to help those who don't.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Sile
I have to admit my disappointment with this book. I like poetry, I really do. Like art, I don't know much about it, but I know what I like. I found most of the poems unappealing apart from the "Sweeney" material and three others: "North", "Song" and "Sloe Gin". Now, given the length of the book
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(240 pages) and the body of work it contains I find it surprising that I could not connect more to what I was reading; rather I was left feeling inadequate and confused. Why couldn't I understand what Mr Heaney was attempting to convey to me, the reader? I was left feeling that Mr Heaney writes for a more sophisticated audience than myself.* Still, we each have our own tastes and "New Selected Poems: 1966-1987" just didn't do it for me. Show Less
LibraryThing member Brendan.H
"In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was
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an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence." Show Less
LibraryThing member brakketh
Beautiful and boggy.
Pages
256
ISBN
0374535604 / 9780374535605