"Sweeney Astray" is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work "Buile Suibhne". Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a demented flying creature at the Battle of Moira.
This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes.
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.
On its original appearance in 1966, Death of a Naturalist won the Cholmondeley Award, a Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. 'His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry.
Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney's new verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone -... Læs mere
The poems in Seamus Heaney's collection The Spirit Level keep discovering the possibilities of 'a new beginning' in all kinds of subjects and circumstances. What is at stake, in poem after poem, is the chance of buoyancy and balance, physical, spiritual and political.
This collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the series of 12-line poems entitled "Squarings", shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and "to credit marvels". The title poem... Læs mere
'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity.
A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes that tells of the wounded hero marooned upon an island by the Greeks during the Siege of Troy. As the conflict comes to a climax, the Greeks begin to... Læs mere
With the sensuousness 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... Læs mere
Faber 90th anniversary edition of this deeply moving, meditative, understated collection from the Nobel Prize-winning poet.
Here 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... Læs mere