Selected Poems 1966-1987 - Hardcover

Heaney, Seamus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374258686 ISBN 13: 9780374258689

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990

Synopsis

"Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it."

Selected Poems 1966-1987 assembles the groundbreaking work of the first half of Seamus Heaney's extraordinary career. This edition, arranged by the author himself, includes the seminal early poetry that struck readers with the force of revelation and heralded the arrival of an heir to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost.
Helen Vendler called Heaney "a poet of the in-between," and the work collected here dwells in the borderlands dividing the ancient and the contemporary, the mythic and the quotidian. Gathering poetry from his first seven collections,Selected Poems 1966-1987 presents the young man from County Derry, Northern Ireland, who "emerged from a hidden, a buried life" inDeath of a Naturalist (1966), with his cherished poems "Digging" and "Mid-term Break"; the poet of conscience "as bleak as he is bright" in "Whatever You Say Say Nothing" and "Singing School"; and the astonishingly gifted, mature craftsman behindField Work (1979) and Station Island (1984)-an artist uncannily attuned to the "music of what happens," restlessly searching "for images and symbols adequate to our predicament."
This volume, together with its companion Selected Poems 1988-2013, allows us to revisit the essential work of one of the great writers of our age through his own compilation.

About this title

Review:

Seamus Heaney was the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize, and this collection reveals the range, sureness, and quality of his achievements. Includes the complete and revised version of his long poem, "Station Island," as well as a number of prose poems previously unpublished in the U.S.

From the Inside Flap:

Praise for author Seamus Heaney

"Perhaps the best descriptions of Seamus Heaney's extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre come from the poet's own work. Mr. Heaney has created a remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' while at the same time remaining 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being.'" ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Having just reread most of his poems, I find myself more, not less, interested, and convinced that I have only begun to plumb their bracing depths . . . The poems stay in the mind, which is the one essential feature of major poetry." ―Jay Parini, The Nation

"Heaney's commitment to the independence of his art, to the pursuit of shape and richness and abundant ambiguity, is also a profound commitment to the quality of public life . . . In a dark time, Heaney . . . has turned borders and dividing lines into rich frontiers." ―Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books

"Arguably the finest poet now writing in English." ―James Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0374258686
• ISBN 13: 9780374258689
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 273