Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence"...
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Sophocles' play stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all...
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From the Publisher: A selection of the best of three decades of writing about poetry, a celebration of the "tenacious curiosity" (Los Angeles Times) of the Nobel laureate. Whether autobiographical, topical, or specifically literary, these writings circle the central preoccupying questions of Seamus Heaney's career: "How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage, and the contemporary...
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Collection of poems by Heaney set on an island which has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. His pilgrim is on an inner journey and proceeds through a series of encounters which lead him back into the which which first formed him and then forward to face the crises of the present. The long poem is preceded by a section of meditative lyrics that leads into a group of poems in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice...
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Selected poems by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet are taken from Heaney's twelve previous collections and includes work published since 1987. This volume gathers the landmark poems from the poets twelve previous collections, & brings the reader up to date with the work published since 1987. Annotation. As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn...
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These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry's special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. 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...
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"Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In...
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This anthology brings together essays by 20th-century poets on their own art: some concern themselves with its deep sources and ultimate justifications; others deal with technique, controversies among schools, the experience behind particular poems. The great Modernists of most countries are presented here--Paul Valéry, Federico García Lorca, Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Eugenio Montale, Wallace Stevens--as are a range of younger, less eminent...
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"What started as a minor Germanic dialect spoken by the Saxons became perhaps England's greatest export ... [T]his eight-part enhanced DVD series tells the story of how English became a global language. Along the way, each episode uses location footage, rare manuscripts, linguistic experts, and fascinating etymologies to chart the growth of English, its encounters with other languages, its history, and its far-reaching influence."--Container.