Seamus Heaney And The Classics

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, made a significant contribution to classical reception in modern poetry; though occasional essays have appeared in the past, this volume is the first to be wholly dedicated to this perspective on his work. Comprising literary criticism by scholars of both classical reception and contemporary literature in English, it includes contributions from critics who are also poets, as well as from theatre practitioners on their interpretations and productions of Heaney's versions of Greek drama; well-known names are joined by early-career contributors, and friends and collaborators of Heaney sit alongside those who admired him from afar. The papers focus on two main areas: Heaney's fascination with Greek drama and myth - shown primarily in his two Sophoclean versions, but also in his engagement in other poems with Hesiod, with Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and with myths such as that of Antaeus - and his interest in Latin poetry, primarily that of Virgil but also that of Horace; a version of an Horatian ode was famously the vehicle for Heaney's comment on the events of 11 September 2001 in 'Anything Can Happen' (District and Circle, 2006). Although a number of the contributions cover similar material, they do so from distinctively different angles: for example, Heaney's interest in Virgil is linked with the traditions of Irish poetry, his capacity as a translator, and his annotations in his own text of a standard translation, as well as being investigated in its long development over his poetic career, while his Greek dramas are considered as verbal poetry, as comments on Irish politics, and as stage-plays with concomitant issues of production and interpretation. Heaney's posthumous translation of Virgil's Aeneid VI (2016) comes in for considerable attention, and this will be the first volume to study this major work from several angles.

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, made a significant contribution to classical reception in modern poetry; though occasional essays have appeared in the past, this volume is the first to be wholly dedicated to this perspective on his work. Comprising literary criticism by scholars of both classical reception and contemporary literature in English, it includes contributions from critics who are also poets, as well as from theatre practitioners on their interpretations and productions of Heaney's versions of Greek drama; well-known names are joined by early-career contributors, and friends and collaborators of Heaney sit alongside those who admired him from afar. The papers focus on two main areas: Heaney's fascination with Greek drama and myth - shown primarily in his two Sophoclean versions, but also in his engagement in other poems with Hesiod, with Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and with myths such as that of Antaeus - and his interest in Latin poetry, primarily that of Virgil but also that of Horace; a version of an Horatian ode was famously the vehicle for Heaney's comment on the events of 11 September 2001 in 'Anything Can Happen' (District and Circle, 2006). Although a number of the contributions cover similar material, they do so from distinctively different angles: for example, Heaney's interest in Virgil is linked with the traditions of Irish poetry, his capacity as a translator, and his annotations in his own text of a standard translation, as well as being investigated in its long development over his poetic career, while his Greek dramas are considered as verbal poetry, as comments on Irish politics, and as stage-plays with concomitant issues of production and interpretation. Heaney's posthumous translation of Virgil's Aeneid VI (2016) comes in for considerable attention, and this will be the first volume to study this major work from several angles.

The title poem from this collection is set on an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. A narrative sequence, it is an autobiographical quest concerned with 'the growth of a poet's mind'. The long poem is preceded by a section of shorter lyrics and leads into a third group of poems in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary mad King Sweeney. 'Surpasses even what one might reasonably expect from this magnificently gifted poet.' John Carey, Sunday Times

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II – railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence" of "Cattle out in rain" – are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present – a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety. But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems which "do the rounds of the district" – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals. District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

This PEN/Hemingway Award winner about coming of age in Los Angeles is a “little gem of a novel . . . a masterwork of Hollywood fiction” (Salon). He’s a child of 1940s Hollywood—specifically, Casa Fiesta, a ranch in the Malibu hills that he shares with his mother, a onetime Broadway headliner, and his father, a star of Westerns. But when his parents fall out of favor in Tinseltown, the narrator of this exquisitely crafted dark comedy loses his youthful idyll and accompanies his lovesick mother on a vodka-soaked international quest for romance and redemption. Meanwhile, his father lives in “diminished circumstances” in California, clinging to his silver-screen mementos, trusting that, someday soon, his ex-wife and his career will return. Tired of tending bar at his mother’s parties and listening to his father’s sad tales of former glory, the boy moves in with his best friend’s family in Beverly Hills. But nothing in La-La Land is quite what it seems, and when his new home turns out to be just as dysfunctional as the last, our teenage hero must somehow learn to accept his parents while finding the courage to break free and become his own man. This award-winning novel, “a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the Cheap Trick generation” (GQ), was cited by the Guardian as one of the “ten best neglected literary masterpieces.” Written by a New York Times–bestselling author who was a child of Hollywood movie stars himself, it has been praised for its “spectacularly deadpan humor” by the Atlantic Monthly and called “an insightful coming-of-age tale” by the Austin Chronicle.

An up-to-date overview of Heaney's career thus far, with detailed readings of all his major publications.

Selected poems from a Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney had the idea to make a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, a collection small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, but now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. No other selection of Heaney’s poems exists that has such a broad range, drawing from the first to the last of his prizewinning collections. In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, and will discover new favorites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching far and wide, for now and for years to come.

With this collection, first published in 1975, Heaney located a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland--its people, history, and landscape--and which gave his poems direction, cohesion, and cumulative power. In North, the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

The first full-length study of Heaney's poetics, Professing Poetry explores Heaney's unusual concept of influence and the various ways in which Heaney interacts with other writers

A masterpiece from one of the greatest poets of the century In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the significance of the poem to his writing, noting that "there's one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas's venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years--the golden bough, Charon's barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father." In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and sophisticated poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of James Wood, "created something imperishable and great that is stainless--stainless, because its force as poetry makes it untouchable by the claw of literalism: it lives singly, as an English language poem."