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    100 Poems
    100 Poems
    100 Poems
    Ebook191 pages2 hours

    100 Poems

    By Seamus Heaney

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Selected poems from a Nobel laureate

    In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, and will discover new favorites, from "The Cure at Troy" to "Death of a Naturalist." It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching far and wide, for now and for years to come.

    Seamus Heaney had the idea to make a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, a collection small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, but now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. No other selection of Heaney’s poems exists that has such a broad range, drawing from the first to the last of his prizewinning collections.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 20, 2019
    ISBN9780374720117
    100 Poems
    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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    • 5/5
      It almost seems irrelevant to write a review of this book. I mean, Seamus Heaney can’t get any better known or loved by me saying *I love this book*.But I do. Just as I am stirred by his words, his perceptions, his way of capturing a thought or juxtaposing two things I would never think to put together (and no, I'm not carried off by every single one of these 100 poems, but by many, *many*, I am), I am also grateful to him. For his honesty, his vulnerability, his tenderness for selves and technologies and humans and leafy spaces that no longer are or are not yet, as in a poem to his toddler grandchild in later years. He has room for all of these in him, and I recognise my own complexity reflected in his, and am grateful for this gentle companion in life.

    Book preview

    100 Poems - Seamus Heaney

    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

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