This collection of Seamus Heaney's poetry, published in a single volume for the first time, gives us the full arc of the Nobel laureate's long and varied career.
This new collection of his great work, at well over two inches thick, is 'great' in a workaday sense of the word, as well. That it might be called a “doorstop” is the kind of homely, conventional joke that would be more likely to amuse, rather than offend, Heaney’s many-minded imagination. His work is magnificent ... Amplifies a reader’s understanding of the poet’s accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating.
Seamus Heaney was a visionary bulwark against small-mindedness ... The Poems of Seamus Heaney definitively reveals the breadth and depth of Heaney’s accomplishment ... Here my gratitude to Heaney matches my thanks to his editors and his family, who have hatched this extraordinary book.
This edition also demonstrates how effectively he could strip out parts from one poem and recycle them more effectively into another. The 'uncollected' sections indicate how themes could be prepared, abandoned, stored, reused ... This edition brings us into the heart of Seamus Heaney’s own sanctum and shows the immense work as well as the inspiration behind the indisputably, miraculously 'real thing' he has left to us.
