Plays & Poetry

Washing Windows V is the biggest anthology of poetry by Irish women ever compiled, with over 300 contemporary women poets, from all over the island and further afield, writing in English and Irish, poems of power, potency and poignancy.

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity.

The poems in Seamus Heaney's collection The Spirit Level keep discovering the possibilities of 'a new beginning' in all kinds of subjects and circumstances. What is at stake, in poem after poem, is the chance of buoyancy and balance, physical, spiritual and political.

Composed towards the end of the first millennium of our era, the Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf" is a Northern epic and a classic of European literature. In this new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is true, line by line, to the original poem.

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney's new verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in Western drama.

With writers ranging from Shakespeare and Blake to Sylvia Plath and T S Eliot, this title brings together an inspired and diverse selection, ranging from undisputed masterpieces to rare discoveries, as well as drawing upon works in translation and traditional poems from oral cultures.

For the fortieth anniversary of its publication, in May 2006, Faber are reissuing Seamus Heaney's classic first collection, Death of a Naturalist, which on its appearance in 1966 won the Cholmondeley Award, the E.C.

In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, the author acknowledged the importance of the poem to his writing, noting that 'there's one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas' venture into the underworld. In this book, he brings the ancient poem back to life.

In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld.

Widely praised on its first publication in 1987, The Haw Lantern ventured into new imaginative territory with poems exploring the theme of loss--including a celebrated sonnet sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother--joined by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein.ical vein.

Seamus Heaney had the idea to form a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. But now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family.