The national bestseller and winner of the Whitbread Award. Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and th[...]

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

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

A collection of elegies and love poems, and a short sonnet sequence which concentrates on such themes as: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.[...]

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 is typical in that it begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary.[...]

A reissue of Heaney's "New Selected Poems 1966-1987", which has been expanded to include work from two subsequent collections, "Seeing Things" and the award-winning "The Spirit Level", as well as poems not previously published.[...]

"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.[...]

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, "The Burial at Thebes" is Seamus Heaney's verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, "Antigone" - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in western drama.[...]

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 ha[...]

First published in 1978, this work contains poems exploring the theme of loss - including a celebrated sonnet sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother - joined by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein.[...]

Widely regarded as the finest poet of his generation, Seamus Heaney is the subject of many critical studies. This book retraces the poet's steps from his early works, through to his receipt of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and his post-Nobel life. It is also supplemented with a large number of[...]

In North Seamus Heaney found a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland - its people, history and landscape. 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[...]

Seamus Heaney's new 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 broa[...]