Images of water and earth. often combined as mud or bogs, dominate these poems. Almost every one contains the words "dark" or "black." Many of them are memories of agricultural operations that sound so primitive (ploughing with horses, churning by hand) that I was not sure if they were genuine. (But should that make a difference? What if we learned that Seamus Heaney was born and raised in Manhattan? ). They are written in the colloquial style of the British "Movement" Some of them contain subtle rhymes and rhythms but some, such at the relatively cheerful "Churning Day" could just as well, or even better, be printed as chunks of prose. There is very little politics but it is evident that he writes as a Northern Itish Catholic.
It's the only book-length Heany I've read so I don't know how representative the selection is. It contains poems from "Death of a Naturalist," "Door Into the Dark." "Wintering Out," "A Northern Hoard," "North" and "Singing School."

...Want a break from poetry that is "sophisticated," "domestic" or "Lacanian"? This is it! It's been a favorite of mine for ten years, restorative on every read. It bears the stamp of green, love, a garden of great poems (Keats, Neruda, "Anonymous" etc.) fresh as the day they were written. This vivid new cover sort of sums up the feeling.

This is a glorious collection of Helen Vendler's prose all about Seamus Heaney the poet, and his poems. Full of deep insight, resonant revelations, and cogent details about poetry, Heaney's poetry, and Heaney the man, it is a marvelous read.

For anyone familiar with Heaney and his poems, this book is a welcome eye-opener, and a fabulous treat.

I recommend this book very highly.

"Sweeney Astray" is a masterpiece on many levels: for the complex weave of its themes to the lyrical quality of its prose--accentuated greatly, of course, by Seamus Heaney's virtuoso translation.

We follow mad Sweeney in his crazed wanderings through the forest and hills, torn within himself by his love of the wild and his incurable loneliness. The tale is presented as chunks of narrative interspersed with segments of poetry, their quiet, melancholy beauty evoking the sounds of windsong and rain.

There is an ethereal quality to this text that makes it difficult to describe. Although it would seem to have a storyline, in reality it is a song, and each "event" a new strain of music. Sweeney's longing for his lost life as a man and king, even as he is unable to stay away from his beloved wilds of Glen Bolcain, illustrate the conflict between the desire for peaceful conformity and for transcendence. This conflict is echoed in the struggle that was ensuing in Ireland even as this work was being written, the struggle between the Celtic religion and the new influx of Christianity.

In this way does "Sweeney Astray" illuminate a historic revolution, while at the same time presenting themes that span eternity.

You could not make a more fantastic selection of the poetry of Yeats. I cannot recommend this text enough to anyone who has even the slightest affinity for Yeats' poetry. If the poems in this selection do not speak to you directly, nothing in Yeats will.

What can one say? Except this is Heaney's third collection of poems, and it is his third masterpiece. These poems celebrate the earth, and groundedness, in a rich, magnificent manner.

The poem, "Midnight" is one of my favorites. It is a meditiation on the wildness that has been lost (and that we are losing) and the wildness we still have, as we and our world become more domesticated, and the language is breathtaking.

All of the poems are great, and for some, a dictionary will be required for most readers. However, Heaney's work is like the diamonds or gold or platinum in the earth .... you must dig for it, but it is astoundingly and deeply rewarding for those who do.

I recommend this collection to everybody.

Seamus Heaney is a master poet who connects nature, emotion, and even plot, in a brilliant and particularly Irish poetry. These poems are accessible to non-English majors. I read them out loud to my wife at night. They elicit a reaction that begins at emotional imagery, veers into thought, and ends up touching your soul. One of the immortal greats of the English language is writing and publishing now, and this book is indispensable.

Those of you who are already familiar with his poems will be delighted to learn of the publication of Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, a bumper crop of Heaney's best work over a thirty year period, and a record of the writer's development from the tentative and introspective poems of Death of a Naturalist (1966) to the authoritative and visionary tonalities of middle age in Seeing Things (1991) and The Spirit Level (1996).

This hefty, 440-page volume gathers together a pruned-down version of each of the author's ten volumes of poetry, plus extracts from his verse play, The Cure at Troy, his translation of the Irish epic poem, Sweeney Astray, and his Nobel Prize lecture, "Crediting Poetry." In 1975, poet Robert Lowell dubbed Heaney "the greatest Irish poet since W.B.Yeats." This volume proves that claim, perhaps too hasty a judgement in 1975, to be fully justified.

One of the most appealing aspects of the early poetry is the dense, tactile language used to evoke scenes of nature on the family farm, often conveyed from the point of view of the small child, and the poems are full of a child's freshness of perception. Farmyard and barnyard, cows, bulls, rats, sheds, wells, rakes, ploughs, and pitchforks appeared in vivid detail in this rural poetic landscape, in which the speaker experienced his solitary epiphanies. Farm workers and rural artisans, including thatchers, ploughmen and even water diviners were transformed into artists in their own right, and as alter egos of the poet himself

In the 1970s, Heaney began to write more directly about the Irish landscape, particularly the marshy bogs, that became emblematic for him of the Irish national consciousness. Heaney imagined the bogland that contained ancient artifacts, bones, skeletons and preserved corpses as dark and magical repositories of the nation's memory, including its memory of violence and bloodshed. In North (1975) he published a series of memorable and moving "bog poems" that explored the parallels between bronze age human sacrifice in ancient Denmark and the killings in Northern Ireland at the time of writing. It is with this book that Heaney became known as the poet of the Northern Irish Troubles. In comparing ancient, pagan cultures with the murderous climate of Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, he conveyed a bleak portrait of a province locked in an ancient conflict that was doomed to continue indefinitely. The next book, Field Work (1979) was notable for its many fine elegies, including several poignant elegies for friends and relations murdered in the Troubles. But this was also a book of blessings, including poems of pastoral peace, and marriage poems set in county Wicklow where Heaney had moved. One of Heaney's dominant strains is the elegiac, and he has continued to produce a fine sequence of elegies for his mother, "Clearances," in The Haw Lantern (1987) and for his father in Seeing Things (1991).

Seamus Heaney is widely admired for his sensuous evocation of a farmyard childhood in Northern Ireland in the 1940s, for his thoughtful and moving approach to the Northern Irish Troubles, conveying the perspectives of nationalist Roman Catholic culture, while avoiding didacticism and outright partisanship, for his fine elegies in which he registers the personal loss of those who were dear to him, and for his more recent, celebratory and visionary poetry. But the main point about him, as with all great poets, is not his subject matter, but the fact that he has enormous linguistic resources, hence the power to convey his experiences freshly and convincingly.

I came to Heaney's work through his translation of Beowulf. The beuty with which he translated that Anglo-Saxon text prompted me to seek out more of the Nobel laureate's work. What I found in this collection amazed me. My primary area of study is medieval literature and I was pleasantly suprised to find that Heaney's poetry, IMO, offers a curious blend of modern and medieval sensibilities, particularly in the poems from "North". Beyond that, Heaney's poetry conveys the sense of sorrow and pain that permeates the present-day Northern Irish experience.

Clearly, this book's greatest asset is that it introduces you much of the poet's work in one sitting. However, I predict that once you read from this book you will go in search of even more of Heaney's beautiful poetry.

It says a lot that of all the books we read during the year in a rigorous English curriculum, many of my best readers picked the Pinksy Inferno as their favorite book of the year. I'm a Mandelbaum fan too (I still like his Aeneid since it's by far the closest to Virgil's Latin and was even helpful when I worked on translating books 4 and 6), but I prefer Pinsky's rendition of Dante's poem. It makes the text alive for generations of new readers. My class appreciated Nicole Pinsky's notes at the end of the book which add greatly to students' comprehension of historical background and context. Hats off to Pinsky for a great work of art that has made Dante more accessible to a new generation of potential fans.

The Inferno is by far the most interesting of the three books which make up Dante's Divine Comedy, and Robert Pinsky's translation is by far the best I've ever read.

The Inferno is the story of Dante's journey through hell on the night before Good Friday in 1300. He moves through the nine circles, until he meets Satan in the middle. Each circle holds souls who committed various sins, each catagorised by their sins and punishments. All of Dante's sinners receive retribution, ironically based on their respective sins. He also fills hell with famous sinners, making it easier to determine what sins belong to which circle of hell. The nine circles are also catagorised by regions: the first five are the sins of incontinence, the next three are the sins of violence, the next is the sins of fraud, and the last and most terrible circle is the sins of betrayal.

One of the most notable things about The Inferno is that Dante's theme is not that of Christian forgiveness, but instead it is justice. All sinners in hell deserve their punishments, and they will suffer them forever. This is illustrated by the case of the sinful love of Francesca da Rimini.

Pinsky's gift to the readers of this version of The Inferno is twofold: the first is his ability to write so well in English, and the second is the way he chose to present the English with regard to the Italian. The Inferno is written in terza rima, which Dante invented for the Divine Comedy. This involves a rhyming scheme, and many translators restrict themselves to it when publishing The Inferno. However, Pinsky keeps the three line stanzas of terza rima while writing in plain verse instead of rhymed, letting him mirror Dante's phrasing and flow without restriction.

Pinsky's version of The Inferno is also bilingual - Italian on the left page and English on the right. This allows even the most casual Italian scholar to follow the translation, and see the logic of it, which is a thoughtful and useful bonus. The notes on each canto are superb, and necessary to catch all of Dante's in-jokes.

This version of The Inferno is perfect for anybody who really wants to read and understand Dante's classic. I recommend it as a gift, to others and to yourself.

It goes without saying that The Inferno is one of the great masterpieces of Western culture. That being the case, Pinksy, not Dante, is the focus of my review. This was the third translation of The Inferno that I have read (Mandelbaum and Ciardi being the others), and it is by far the most graceful of the group. I was particularly impressed with his handling of that ever present problem: the rhyme scheme. His solution to the problem is fluid and faithful to the original text (something Mandelbaum's rhyme-free translation lacks), without being distracting (as I found Ciardi's to be). But, what is truly amazing is that he is able to maintain this scheme without ever sounding forced or contrived. This allows Pinsky's tranlsation to remain first and foremost, a poem, which is so crucial in realizing the true genious of Dante's work. I was also pleased with Pinsky's decision to put a line of white space between each triplet. This really helped to accentuate the pacing and structure that make terza rima so important. The inclusion of the Italian text is also a nice touch. Finally, the notes are concise and informative. While Mandelbaum's notes seemed to me a little too thorough, often glossing the obvious, these give pertinent information without ever condescending to the reader. My only complaint would be that Pinksy stopped at the Inferno. I firmly believe that one must experience a work of art in its entirety in order to fully experience its brilliance. This is very true of the Divine Comedy. While there are certainly plenty of Purgatorios and Paradisos out there, I would very much have liked to have been able to maintain the continuity of a single translator. While there is a long list of translators who provide this option, I regret that Pinksy is not among them.

For those who have heard the names of Grendel and Beowulf and seen the epic alluded to in comic books, movies and Michael Crichton's EATERS OF THE DEAD, this version of the tale should serve as a good introduction.

The only other translation of BEOWULF I'm familiar with is the Burton Raffel one which I've read three times and still prefer to Heaney's. However, not knowing Old English, I can't say which is more accurate. Raffel does try to preserve the structure of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse while Heaney, as he notes in his introduction, never feels compelled to strictly follow that form though he does quite a bit.

However, I suspect many readers may find that old verse form strange, awkward, and a bit offputting, and, for them, this version of the old epic is probably the best. I always found the last third of the epic the most moving and melancholy, and, there, Heaney's translation is as powerful as Raffel's.

Years ago I read this wonderful epic for the first time and was enthralled with its terrific characters. Unfortunately the translation I read was very difficult to understand and I had problems trying to match characters with pronouns among other things. This translation has no such problems. It is very readable. The readability of the text obviously enhances the experience since one can concentrate on the content and not on the difficult language. Another nice feature is the inclusion of the original text. While I can not read it, it is certainly very interesting to compare.

The actually epic of Beowulf is a great knights tale that has been revived as a result of Tolkein's interest in the work. In my opinion it is the greatest epic ever written. While it is much shorter than say the Iliad, I certainly found it more entertaining. Beowulf's adventure's with Grendal and his mother(thank goodness none of our mother-in-laws were like this) can not be beat. Don't miss this enchanting tell.

I also highly recommend this book on tape read by Heaney. His Irish accent gives the story a dark ages feeling that really enhances the experience.

After reading Tolkien's "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" as well as his epic fantasy, my own path was set: I became an English medievalist and, in fact, as a senior graduate student, taught Beowulf under the direction of William Alfred of Harvard before graduating and going on to become a writer of fantasy and science fiction.

I've tried to do my own alliterative translations: Mr. Heaney's translation comes as a delight for a number of reasons. Chief among them is this: he's the best poet to tackle BEOWULF since the original -scop-. Even 20 years after my grad school days, I read Old English. Heaney has produced a translation that is profoundly moving. If he sometimes diverges from the four-stress alliterative pattern, with the third stress being the main one, it's by design -- and he's explained it. He spares us the most convoluted kennings, but gives us, instead, the tautness, the spaces between the words, the pauses for thought, tension, and what Tolkien and Auden referred to as the Northern Thing -- the austere combination of faith and darkness that is Wyrd. It's a solid translation and a fine poem in Heaney's hands.

And it consoles me for not having a full translation by Tolkien and that John Gardner never lived to translate BEOWULF as he had hoped.

It is also delightful to consider that, for the first time since the death of T.S. Eliot, poetry is going to the top of the best-seller lists.

Mr. Heaney, although he is not a ring-giver, rings true, and has given us a great gift.

the latest collection of poetry from seamus heaney isn't his best work. in fact, if you aren't familiar with his work you'd do better starting with opened ground. there is a pensive tone throughout the collection, and the entire second half is written for recently dead poets. when you read this you can see why he won the nobel, but i'd wait to read this after you've gone through his selected poems. and here are some other poets you may enjoy: dylan thomas, yeats, robert frost, r.s. gwynn, david mason

With "Electric Light", Seamus Heaney steps over, or rather blurs, the boundary between poet and audience. Although some of his earlier work has dealt with poetry from the writer's perspective, numerous works in this book are addressed to, dedicated to, or in memory of (and in some cases all three) other poets. At times, this can give this collection a somewhat elegiac tone, but Heaney's powerful, careful and affecting use of the English language shines throughout, particularly in "Audenesque", which manages to be a tribute to Auden, an elegy for Joseph Brodsky, and a fine exercise in meter and rhythm all in one.

As with previous collections, Heaney's memories of his childhood and youth in Ireland are cleverly intermixed with classical allusion and earthy modern notes. Overall, the tone of "Electric Light" is darker than that of, say "The Spirit Level" (the title poem, for example, has more substance and less enticing whimsy than his previous "A Sofa in the Forties") but this merely allows moments of fun, such as his "Glosses" - ten short pieces on various subjects- "The Real Names" and "Red, White, and Blue" to stand out more clearly than they might have otherwise.

Heaney has written and spoken eloquently on the "redress of poetry"- the purpose, the need and the drive of poetry to serve as a medium of communication and conversation in the modern, larger world as well as the classical, academic one. With its juxtaposition of poetic in-jokes, everyday observation and personal but not private reminiscence, "Electric Light" strikes a kind balance between these two worlds.

Visit the following URL for my review of Electric Light:

http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/heaney.htm