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    Selected Poems 1966-1987
    Selected Poems 1966-1987
    Selected Poems 1966-1987
    Ebook282 pages3 hours

    Selected Poems 1966-1987

    By Seamus Heaney

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    About this ebook

    "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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 13, 2014
    ISBN9781466855786
    Selected Poems 1966-1987
    Author

    Seamus Heaney

    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."

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    Reviews for Selected Poems 1966-1987

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    • 4/5

      Jun 5, 2017

      "In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence."
    • 4/5

      Nov 28, 2020

      Beautiful and boggy.
    • 4/5

      Apr 9, 2013

      The most moving of all of these, I think, is "Mid Term Break". Seamus Heaney has a simple, direct way of writing in this poem that lends it a lot of clarity and makes you aware of every word. I'm also fond of "Digging" and "Follower".
    • 4/5

      Jan 30, 2013

      To be honest, I really enjoyed Heaney's poetry: there is a strong imagery in each of his poems, a sense of 'belonging' to a land and its rural roots. I do not know why I have avoided his poetry until my Lit degree course required it, because Irish life, history and culture are evident in the way that Heaney treats his themes. In the end, I have felt many affinities in a lot of his poems because they made me remember my rural roots and childhood in Aveyron, and, like life itself, poetry evolves with age and maturity. Like a good wine, he achieves a mosaic of complex emotions and styles. This is a very good read and I especially recommend this book to people who were raised in the countryside and/or who have lived in close-knit rural communities.
    • 3/5

      Apr 11, 2011

      I have to admit my disappointment with this book. I like poetry, I really do. Like art, I don't know much about it, but I know what I like. I found most of the poems unappealing apart from the "Sweeney" material and three others: "North", "Song" and "Sloe Gin". Now, given the length of the book (240 pages) and the body of work it contains I find it surprising that I could not connect more to what I was reading; rather I was left feeling inadequate and confused. Why couldn't I understand what Mr Heaney was attempting to convey to me, the reader? I was left feeling that Mr Heaney writes for a more sophisticated audience than myself.* Still, we each have our own tastes and "New Selected Poems: 1966-1987" just didn't do it for me.

    Book preview

    Selected Poems 1966-1987 - Seamus Heaney

    FROM

    Death of a Naturalist

    (1966)

    Digging

    Between my finger and my thumb

    The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

    Under my window, a clean rasping sound

    When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

    My father, digging. I look down

    Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

    Bends low, comes up twenty years away

    Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

    Where he was digging.

    The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

    Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

    He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

    To scatter new potatoes that we picked

    Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

    By God, the old man could handle a spade.

    Just like his old man.

    My grandfather cut more turf in a day

    Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

    Once I carried him milk in a bottle

    Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

    To drink it, then fell to right away

    Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

    Over his shoulder, going down and down

    For the good turf. Digging.

    The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

    Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

    Through living roots awaken in my head.

    But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

    Between my finger and my thumb

    The squat pen rests.

    I’ll dig with it.

    Death of a Naturalist

    All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

    Of the townland; green and heavy-headed

    Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

    Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

    Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

    Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

    There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,

    But best of all was the warm thick slobber

    Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

    In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

    I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

    Specks to range on window-sills at home,

    On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

    The fattening dots burst into nimble-

    Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

    The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

    And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

    Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was

    Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

    For they were yellow in the sun and brown

    In rain.

        Then one hot day when fields were rank

    With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

    Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

    To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

    Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

    Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked

    On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

    The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

    Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

    I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

    Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew

    That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

    Blackberry-Picking

    For Philip Hobsbaum

    Late August, given heavy rain and sun

    For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

    At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

    Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

    You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

    Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

    Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

    Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

    Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots

    Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

    Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills

    We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

    Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

    With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

    Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

    With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

    We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

    But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

    A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

    The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

    The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

    I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair

    That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

    Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

    Follower

    My father worked with a horse-plough,

    His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

    Between the shafts and the furrow.

    The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

    An expert. He would set the wing

    And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

    The sod rolled over without breaking.

    At the headrig, with a single pluck

    Of reins, the sweating team turned round

    And back into the land. His eye

    Narrowed and angled at the ground,

    Mapping the furrow exactly.

    I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,

    Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

    Sometimes he rode me on his back

    Dipping and rising to his plod.

    I wanted to grow up and plough,

    To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

    All I ever did was follow

    In his broad shadow round the farm.

    I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

    Yapping always. But today

    It is my father who keeps stumbling

    Behind me, and will not go away.

    Mid-Term Break

    I sat all morning in the college sick bay

    Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

    At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

    In the porch I met my father crying—

    He had always taken funerals in his stride—

    And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

    The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

    When I came in, and I was embarrassed

    By old men standing up to shake my hand

    And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.

    Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

    Away at school, as my mother held my hand

    In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

    At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived

    With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

    Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

    And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

    For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

    Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

    He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

    No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

    A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

    Poem

    For Marie

    Love, I shall perfect for you the

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