HEANEY SEAMUS (NOBEL 1995)

(P/B) DOOR INTO THE DARK
Originally published in 1969, Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark continues a furrow so startlingly opened in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). With the sensuosness and physicality of language that would become the hallmark of his early writing, these poems graphically depict the author's rural upbringing, from the local forge to the banks of Lough Neagh, concluding in the preserving waters of the bogland and a look ahead to his next book, Wintering Out (1972). (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) HUMAN CHAIN
Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyric, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other ‘hermit songs’ which weigh equally i...
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(P/B) WINTERING OUT

(H/B) DISTRICT AND CIRCLE
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 coloured by a strongly contemporary sense that 'anything can ha...
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(P/B) STATION ISLAND
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. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE DIARY OF ONE WHO VANISHED

BEOWULF

ΑΛΦΑΒΗΤΑ (ΣΚΛΗΡΟΔΕΤΗ ΕΚΔΟΣΗ)
"Έφεξε η Ανατολή", τραγουδούσε, "λαμπρό σημάδι του Θεού", και η φουρτούνα κόπασε. Έβλεπα ακρωτήρια και φαγωμένα βράχια. Συχνά, η μοίρα προσπερνά όποιον δεν είχε σημαδέψει, σαν δείξει την ανδρεία του. Και όπου του ανέφεραν την ένστασή τους - ότι, δηλαδή, το έργο του ειχε γίνει αποσπασματικό, ότι δεν ήσαν πια σίγουροι γι' αυτόν, ότι δεν ανεγνώριζαν πρώτο ή τελευταίο στίχο - απάντησε με μιαν ερώτηση. "Από πότε", ερώτησε, "ο πρώτος και ο τελευταίος στίχος ενός ποιήματος είναι η αρχή και το τέλος του;" [Από την έκδοση]...
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