The Redress of Poetry

The Redress of Poetry
Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1466855770

Heaney's ten lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, collected here in The Redress of Poetry, explore the poetry of a wide range of writers, from Christopher Marlowe to John Clare to Oscar Wilde. Whether he concentrates on moments in the works under discussion, or is concerned to advance his general subject, Heaney's insight and eloquence are themselves of poetic order.

Door into the Dark

Door into the Dark
Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466864087

Door into the Dark, Seamus Heaney's second collection of poems, first appeared in 1969. Already his widely celebrated gifts of precision, thoughtfulness, and musicality were everywhere apparent.

Station Island

Station Island
Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2010-11-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0571262767

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

District and Circle

District and Circle
Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466855495

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.

The Rattle Bag

The Rattle Bag
Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2005-03-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0571225837

A collection of more than 400 hundred poems from all around the world.

Preoccupations

Preoccupations
Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1466855754

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's first collection of prose, Preoccupations, begins with a vivid account of his early years on his father's farm in Northern Ireland and his coming of age as a student and teacher in Belfast. Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.

Professing Poetry

Professing Poetry
Author: Michael Cavanagh
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813216710

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

The Life of Words

The Life of Words
Author: David-Antoine Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198812477

For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original 'true meaning' asserted in the etymology of 'etymology' declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was 'arbitrary', or 'unmotivated', a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our 'Age of the Arbitrary', whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of 'fallacy' or 'true meaning'. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, and J. H. Prynne.

Some Say the Lark

Some Say the Lark
Author: Jennifer Chang
Publisher: Alice James Books
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1938584716

"Some Say the Lark is a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination—the familiar world rendered strange." —Natasha Trethewey Chang’s poems narrate grief and loss, and intertwines them with hope for a fresh start in the midst of new beginnings. With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history. From "The Winter's Wife": I want wild roots to prosper an invention of blooms, each unknown to every wise gardener. If I could be a color. If I could be a question of tender regard. I know crabgrass and thistle. I know one algorithm: it has nothing to do with repetition or rhythm. It is the route from number to number (less to more, more to less), a map drawn by proof not faith. Unlike twilight, I do not conclude with darkness. I conclude. Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, which was a finalist for the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers and listed by Hyphen Magazine as a Top Five Book of Poetry for 2008. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, The Nation, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.