Selected Poems 1966-1987

Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Selected Poems 1966-1987 assembles the groundbreaking work of the first half of Seamus Heaney's extraordinary career. This edition, arranged by the author himself, includes the seminal early poetry that struck readers with the force of revelation and heralded the arrival of an heir to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost.
Helen Vendler called Heaney a poet of the in-between, and the work collected here dwells in the borderlands dividing the ancient and the contemporary, the mythic and the quotidian. Gathering poetry from his first seven collections, Selected Poems 1966-1987 presents the young man from County Derry, Northern Ireland, who emerged from a hidden, a buried life in Death of a Naturalist (1966), with his cherished poems Digging and Mid-term Break; the poet of conscience as bleak as he is bright in Whatever You Say Say Nothing and Singing School; and the astonishingly gifted, mature craftsman behind Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984)--an artist uncannily attuned to the music of what happens, restlessly searching for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.
This volume, together with its companion Selected Poems 1988-2013, allows us to revisit the essential work of one of the great writers of our age through his own compilation.

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 11/18/2014
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780374535605
ISBN10: 0374535604
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author

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.