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of the poet’s accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating.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.
The new, highly anticipated collection of Heaney’s poems, released in the United States this month, makes an unfortunate departure from his legacy of rigor, answering a reading public’s hunger for an expanded oeuvre, for more of the 'product' that Heaney feared, later in life, he had become.
