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Nabokov said the pleasures of reading literature can be sensed in the raising of the hairs on the spine, and there are spine tingling thrills aplenty in this ample collection of Heaney's poems.
Within are his early nature poems evoking the earthy rural Irish country 'Digging', 'Death of a Naturalist', through to his political poems, his saga poems, his love poems, his epic translations.
The language swoops effortlessly from the journalistic to the mythological. Just a taste here:
'To every cocked ear, expert in its greed/his battered signature subscribes 'No Pope'./The goatskin's sometimes plastered with his blood./The air is pounding like a stethoscope. (Heaney here drawing on his mastery of language in sectarian fashion to portray the Orange marhcers as hideous, pulsing creatures in 'Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966)
And the nature side 'The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge.' (From 'Digging', Heaney's pean to the pen over the shovel)
And the Miltonic epic style: 'I returned to a long strand/the hammered curve of a bay,/and found only the secular/powers of the Atlantic thundering.
Truly Heaney has a gift for the taste, texture, heft and sound of words.
Dazzling and intense works. Good overview of his output. Although this is not the Collected Poetry of Heaney it does contain almost all his best poems up to 1996, as well as his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture (a gem) and an excerpt from his play Cure a Troy. Essential poetry volume.
"Kind of interesting..."
2007-01-08
- Reviewed By User: A1GCK0BKVWJ4BB
I needed the book for a class... I went in to reading it like it was going to be garbage... But it actually was a little bit interesting...
If you have not read Seamus Heaney, then you are not in touch with what the English language is in its heart. Heaney's simple, unstrained word usage, coupled with a deep knowledge of the rich Anglo-Saxon which is our cornerstone, evokes a strength which comes not so much from what we see and know as from something which is rooted deeply in our psyches as Anglo-Europeans (or at least those living in and a part of such cultures). Heaney also brings to light the beauty of the ordinary, primarily by weighting it with the yoke of history and the various passions of his fellow man.
I bought this collection because I enjoyed others of his works (especially The Spirit Level and Seeing Things), which I uncovered at the library, too much to go long without his poetry. And this collection turns out to have all of my favorites from those volumes, as well as the best and most skilled of the poems of his earlier volumes. Do I recommend it? I wouldn't have prominently displayed the fact that I was reading it in numerous public places if I didn't, now would I?
"Seamus Heaney's Poems"
2005-12-18
- Reviewed By User: A6STTZ1LPG889
After currently studying the quality of Seamus Heaney's poems, i am quite sure that this book will not dissapoint you. The quality of Heaney's poems are somewhat outstanding, they are a shock, as you dont normally read poems of this sort, and once you read one, you have to read the others. One of my personal favourites is Mid-Term Break.
strong poems, there is a sadness and a resignation of fog that permeates these poems. this is a melancholy man, one for whom the all-pervading glue of inaction and paralysis bounds him to a bleak world, soiled and grey and drab. this is a weary poet, too nauseated with reality's bruised soldiers, slovenly rudeness, the uncouth glutton, the debauched fiend. i enjoy him, immerse myself in his dust-gloom, his inability to soar into elation and falcon-freedom.
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