Selected Poems 1988-2013

A new edition of the later selected work of a Nobel Prize-winning poet

Often considered to be "the greatest poet of our age" (The Guardian), Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He saw poetry as a vocation and credited it with "the power to persuade the vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values." Paul Muldoon wrote that Heaney was "the only poet I can think of who was recognized worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority."
Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney began to compile Selected Poems 1988–2013, and although he was unable to complete the project, his choices have been followed here. This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991) with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996) where we experience "the poem as ploughshare that turns time / Up and over."; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

from Seeing Things (1991)

The Golden Bough

Markings

Man and Boy

Seeing Things

An August Night

Field of Vision

The Pitchfork

The Settle Bed

from Glanmore Revisited

i Scrabble

ii The Cot

v Lustral Sonnet

vii The Skylight

A Pillowed Head

A Royal Prospect

Wheels within Wheels

Fosterling

from Squarings

Lightenings

Settings

Crossings

Squarings

from The Spirit Level (1996)

The Rain Stick

Mint

A Sofa in the Forties

Keeping Going

Two Lorries

Damson

Weighing In

St Kevin and the Blackbird

from The Flight Path

Mycenae Lookout

1 The Watchman’s War

2 Cassandra

3 His Dawn Vision

4 The Nights

5 His Reverie of Water

The Gravel Walks

Whitby-sur-Moyola

‘Poet’s Chair’

The Swing

Two Stick Drawings

A Call

The Errand 100

A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

The Strand

The Walk

At the Wellhead

At Banagher

Tollund

Postscript

from Beowulf (1999)

[lines 1–163]

[lines 3137–3182]

from Electric Light (2001)

Perch

Lupins

from Out of the Bag

The Little Canticles of Asturias

Ballynahinch Lake

The Clothes Shrine

Glanmore Eclogue

Sonnets from Hellas

1 Into Arcadia

2 Conkers

3 Pylos

4 The Augean Stables

5 Castalian Spring

6 Desfi na

Vitruviana

Audenesque

To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert

Bodies and Souls

1 In the Afterlife

2 Nights of ’57

3 The Bereaved

from Electric Light

from District and Circle (2006)

A Shiver

Anahorish 1944

Anything Can Happen

District and Circle

Wordsworth’s Skates

Found Prose

1 The Lagans Road

2 Tall Dames

3 Boarders

The Lift

Nonce Words

Stern

from Out of This World

1 ‘Like everybody else . . .’

In Iowa

Höfn

The Tollund Man in Springtime

Planting the Alder

Tate’s Avenue

Fiddleheads

Quitting Time

The Blackbird of Glanmore

from Human Chain (2010)

‘Had I not been awake’

Album

The Conway Stewart

Uncoupled

The Butts

Chanson d’Aventure

Miracle

Human Chain

The Baler

Eelworks

The Riverbank Field

Route 110

Wraiths

i Sidhe

ii Parking Lot

iii White Nights

‘The door was open and the house was dark’

In the Attic

A Kite for Aibhín

In Time (2013)