Books by Seamus Heaney

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, 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 the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

Seamus Heaney (winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1995) gathered over 200 of his best poems in this collection, selected from twelve of his previous books of published poetry. The selection covers the period 1966 - 1996. It also contains his Nobel Lecture, "Crediting Poetry", since, as the author explains, "the ground covered in the lecture is ground originally opened by the poems which here precede it."