Best Selling Books by Seamus Heaney

"Between my fingers and my thumb The squat pen rests. I''ll dig with it." Selected Poems 1966-1987 assembles the groundbreaking work of the first half of Seamus Heaney''s extraordinary career. This edition, arranged by the author himself, includes the seminal early poetry that struck readers with the force of revelation and heralded the arrival of an heir to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost. Helen Vendler called Heaney "a poet of the in-between," and the work collected here dwells in the borderlands dividing the ancient and the contemporary, the mythic and the quotidian. Gathering poetry from his first seven collections, Selected Poems 1966-1987 presents the young man from County Derry, Northern Ireland, who "emerged from a hidden, a buried life" in Death of a Naturalist (1966), with his cherished poems "Digging" and "Mid-term Break"; the poet of conscience "as bleak as he is bright" in "Whatever You Say Say Nothing" and "Singing School"; and the astonishingly gifted, mature craftsman behind Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984)-an artist uncannily attuned to the "music of what happens," restlessly searching "for images and symbols adequate to our predicament." This volume, together with its companion Selected Poems 1988-2013, allows us to revisit the essential work of one of the great writers of our age through his own compilation.

Seamus Heaney describes the haw lantern as "small light for small people" but there is more than tiny illumination emanating from one of Ireland''s premier poets. Heaney peppers this short collection of poems with crafty language and natural objects: "I heard the hatchet''s differentiated/Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh/And collapse of what luxuriated/Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all." The Haw Lantern won England''s Whitbread Prize in 1987.

"Each of the translations in this book can be read for its own sake or as part of a triptych. By setting excerpts of Brian Merriman''s Cuirt an Mhean Oiche within the acoustic of a classical myth (the story of Orpheus and Eurydice), Seamus Heaney provides a new and illuminating context for the eighteenth century Irish poem. For this paperback reissue, the poet has made some revisions in the text of the original Gallery Press edition."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney''s work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author''s work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a ''Collected Poems'' as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that have appeared since, together with examples of his work as a translator from the Greek, Latin, Italian and other languages. The book concludes with ''Crediting Poetry'', the speech with which Seamus Heaney accepted the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, for his ''works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth''.

In this English translation of poems written by Ozef Kalda, which were set to music by Leos Janacek, the folktale of a farmer''s boy who abandons his home because he has fallen in love with a gypsy is told.

Three of our generation''s greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologies that surround Robert Frost.

This collection of Seamus Heaney''s work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled Squarings, shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and to credit marvels. The title poem, Seeing Things, is typical of the whole book. It begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary while never relinquishing its feel for the textures and sensations of the world.

1. Trial binding labelled "dusted lemon gold, front blind; 10/3/79,"--2. Uncut sheets of gatherings A and B for the London, Boston ed. of Field work published by Faber and Faber. -- 3. Dust jacket for the New York ed. by Farrar, Straus, Giroux with ms. note "1st proof, 10/2/99."

Heaney here scrutinizes the work of several poets, British and Irish, American and European, whose work he considers might call into question the rights of poetic utterance. The author asks whether the voice of the poet should be governed, or whether it should be the governor.

Inspired by Seaaemus Heaney''s poems, and notably by the mediaeval Irish saga Buile Suibhne, the photographer Rachel Giese has produced a portfolio of pictures of the northern Irish landscape, covering the boundaries of Mad Sweeney''s original kingdom of Dal-Arie. She has recently followed the clues to topography and the natural world in Sweeney''s wanderings, and gathered together 40 photographs which Seamus Heaney has matched with extracts and quotations from his book Sweeney Astray. The whole of the text for Sweeney Astray is printed in the second section of this book.

There is something about a treasure, wrote Joseph Conrad, that fastens on a man''s mind. And, yes, there is something about the subject of treasure hunting that continues to fascinate us. One need only browse the Web to discover a whole netherworld of treasure-hunting magazines, metal-detector clubs, and lost-mine information exchanges that apparently engage the funds and spare time of thousands of hopefuls. Charles Elliott recaptures the essential romance of the search in this collection of classic stories. Many are true - or purport to be. They take place under the sea, in jungles, on desert islands, even in the attics of old houses. What is common to them all is the excitement of the chase and the possibility - irrational, perhaps, but unavoidable - that a fabulous treasure really is there for the finding.

Spiral-bound ruled notebook (98 pages ; 28 cm) containing handwritten drafts of poems written between September 1970 and February 1971, and copies (45 pages), primarily typescript, with emendations in the author''s hand. With letter of transmittal, undated, from the author to James D. Hart (identifying poems that are scheduled for publication) and a final draft of the poem, "Toast," presented to Hart.