Plays & Poetry

This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987). 'His is 'close-up' poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions.

A companion to The Rattle Bag, The School Bag is an engaging and authoritative selection for the classroom. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes have chosen an eclectic range of poets read in today's schools, but also those poems that the editors themselves read at school, or those from which they learned the most.

Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered.

Provides an unrivalled account of a period of work that was crowned by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. This book reprints the author's chosen poems from his later years.

The title, The Government of the Tongue, carries suggestions of both monastic discipline and untrammelled romanticism, and is meant to raise an old question about the rights and status of poetic utterance itself.

"Sweeney Astray" is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work "Buile Suibhne". Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a demented flying creature at the Battle of Moira.

This edition of Seamus Heaney's seminal fourth collection North, reproduced in its elegant first setting and original jacket, marks fifty years since first publication.

Here is the definitive edition of Seamus Heaney's poetry, with illuminating critical notes, including a substantial number of uncollected poems and a selection of poems never published before.

This is the first ever collected volume of Seamus Heaney's translations from languages including Old and Middle Irish and English, Medieval Italian, Classical Greek and Latin and Modern Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, German and Greek.

Here the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.

A collection of elegies and love poems, and a short sonnet sequence which concentrates on such themes as: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.

He proceeds to explore how this 'redress' manifests itself in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', 'The Midnight Court' by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Brian Merriman, John Clare's vernacular writing and Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'.