This text presents a faithful rendition of "Beowulf", a poem written in Old English sometime before the tenth century A.D., which describes the adventures of a great Scandinavian warrior of the sixth century. The translation is combined with detailed annotations, with no reading knowledge of Old Eng[...]

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 Wor[...]

A compelling compendium of poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet represents a definitive overview of the work of the seminal author of Second Space, Facing the River, and other works.[...]

Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator explores the range of Heaney's writing, emphasizing significant intersections in his work - meeting places; spaces between; tradition meeting the contemporary context as life meets death; liminal poetic representations and political divisions; town and woods, [...]

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age i[...]

Widely regarded as the finest poet of his generation, Seamus Heaney is the subject of numerous critical studies, but no book-length portrait has appeared before now. Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, "Stepping Stones "retraces the poet's steps from his first exploratory testing of t[...]

The title poem of this collection, set on an Irish island, tells of a pilgrim on an inner journey that leads him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called this narrative sequence "as fine a l[...]

Seamus Heaney defines the title of this work of criticism as follows: "To redress poetry is to know and celebrate it for its forcibleness as itself . . . not only as a matter of profferd argument and edifying content but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul." Throughout this collec[...]

In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on airThat is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold
In the everything flows and steady go of the world.

—from "Perch"
Seamus Heaney's new collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world a[...]

In this outstanding new translation, commissioned by Ireland's renowned Abbey Theatre to commemorate its centenary, Seamus Heaney exposes the darkness and the humanity in Sophocles' masterpiece, and inks it with his own modern and masterly touch.[...]

A "Boston Globe" Best Poetry Book of 2011Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry PrizeWinner of the 2011 Poetry Now AwardSeamus 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 stone[...]