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    Poems, 1965-1975
    Poems, 1965-1975
    Poems, 1965-1975
    Ebook235 pages2 hours

    Poems, 1965-1975

    By Seamus Heaney

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    About this ebook

    Poems, 1965-1975 gathers nearly all of the poems from Seamus Heaney's first four collections: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 13, 2014
    ISBN9781466855717
    Poems, 1965-1975
    Author

    Seamus Heaney

    Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

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    • 5/5
      Simply genius.
    • 5/5
      What can you say about Seamus Heaney that hasn't already been said? One should be able to understand why he has won the awards he has. Is he Ireland's greatest poet? Perhaps simply one of the greatest poets ever? Hell, I feel lucky just to have been published alongside him in some of the same journals, especially Irish ones. For god's sake, if you don't know his work, look it up. This book is a great place to start and definitely recommended!

    Book preview

    Poems, 1965-1975 - Seamus Heaney

    BOOKS BY SEAMUS HEANEY

    POETRY

    Death of a Naturalist

    Door into the Dark

    Wintering Out

    North

    Field Work

    Poems 1965–1975

    Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish

    Station Island

    The Haw Lantern

    Selected Poems 1966–1987

    Seeing Things

    Sweeney’s Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese)

    The Spirit Level

    CRITICISM

    Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–78

    The Government of the Tongue

    The Redress of Poetry

    PLAYS

    The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes

    TRANSLATIONS

    Laments: Poems of Jan Kochanowski (with Stanislaw Baranczak)

    Seamus Heaney

    POEMS

    1965–1975

    Death of a Naturalist

    Door into the Dark

    Wintering Out

    North

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    18 West 18th Street. New York 10011

    Copyright © 1966. 1969. 1975. 1975. 1980 by Seamus Heaney

    All right reserved

    Printed in the United States of America

    Published in 1980 by Farrar. Straus and Giroux

    First paperback edition. 1980

    Seven poems

    that appeared in the original edition

    of Death of a Naturalist

    are not included in this volume.

    Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 80068753

    Paperback ISBN-13:978-0-375-5162-9

    Paperback ISBN-10:0-374-51652-9

    www.fsgbooks.com

    31 33 34 32 30

    CONTENTS

    Death of a Naturalist

    Digging

    Death of a Naturalist

    The Barn

    An Advancement of Learning

    Blackberry-Picking

    Churning Day

    The Early Purges

    Follower

    Ancestral Photograph

    Mid-Term Break

    Dawn Shoot

    At a Potato Digging

    For the Commander of the ‘Eliza’

    The Diviner

    Turkeys Observed

    Cow in Calf

    Trout

    Docker

    Gravities

    Twice Shy

    Valediction

    Lovers on Aran

    Poem

    Honeymoon Flight

    Scaffolding

    In Small Townlands

    Personal Helicon

    Door into the Dark

    Night-Piece

    Gone

    Dream

    The Outlaw

    The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon

    The Forge

    Thatcher

    The Peninsula

    In Gallarus Oratory

    Girls Bathing, Galway

    Requiem for the Croppies

    Rite of Spring

    Undine

    The Wife’s Tale

    Mother

    Cana Revisited

    Elegy for a Still-born Child

    Victorian Guitar

    Night Drive

    At Ardboe Point

    Relic of Memory

    A Lough Neagh Sequence

    1. Up the Shore

    2. Beyond Sargasso

    3. Bait

    4. Setting

    5. Lifting

    6. The Return

    7. Vision

    The Given Note

    Whinlands

    The Plantation

    Shoreline

    Bann Clay

    Bogland

    Wintering Out

    PART ONE

    Fodder

    Bog Oak

    Anahorish

    Servant Boy

    The Last Mummer

    Land

    Gifts of Rain

    Toome

    Broagh

    Oracle

    The Backward Look

    Traditions

    A New Song

    The Other Side

    The Wool Trade

    Linen Town

    A Northern Hoard

    1. Roots

    2. No Man’s Land

    3. Stump

    4. No Sanctuary

    5. Tinder

    Midnight

    The Tollund Man

    Nerthus

    Cairn-maker

    Navvy

    Veteran’s Dream

    Augury

    PART TWO

    Wedding Day

    Mother of the Groom

    Summer Home

    Serenades

    Somnambulist

    A Winter’s Tale

    Shore Woman

    Maighdean Mara

    Limbo

    Bye-Child

    Good-night

    First Calf

    May

    Fireside

    Dawn

    Travel

    Westering

    North

    Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication for Mary Heaney

    1 Sunlight

    2 The Seed Cutters

    PART ONE

    Antaeus

    Belderg

    Funeral Rites

    North

    Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces

    The Digging Skeleton

    Bone Dreams

    Come to the Bower

    Bog Queen

    The Grauballe Man

    Punishment

    Strange Fruit

    Kinship

    Ocean’s Love to Ireland

    Aisling

    Act of Union

    The Betrothal of Cavehill

    Hercules and Antaeus

    PART TWO

    The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream

    Whatever You Say Say Nothing

    Freedman

    Singing School

    1 The Ministry of Fear

    2 A Constable Calls

    3 Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966

    4 Summer 1969

    5 Fosterage

    6 Exposure

    DEATH OF A NATURALIST

    FOR MARIE

    DIGGING

    Between my finger and my thumb

    The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

    Under my window, a clean rasping sound

    When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

    My father, digging. I look down

    Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

    Bends low, comes up twenty years away

    Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

    Where he was digging.

    The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

    Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

    He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

    To scatter new potatoes that we picked

    Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

    By God, the old man could handle a spade.

    Just like his old man.

    My grandfather cut more turf in a day

    Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

    Once I carried him milk in a bottle

    Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

    To drink it, then fell to right away

    Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

    Over his shoulder, going down and down

    For the good turf. Digging.

    The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

    Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

    Through living roots awaken in my head.

    But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

    Between my finger and my thumb

    The squat pen rests.

    I’ll dig with it.

    DEATH OF A NATURALIST

    All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

    Of the townland; green and heavy headed

    Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

    Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

    Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

    Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

    There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,

    But best of all was the warm thick slobber

    Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

    In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

    I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

    Specks to range on window-sills at home,

    On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

    The fattening dots burst into nimble-

    Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

    The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

    And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

    Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was

    Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

    For they were yellow in the sun and brown

    In rain.

    Then one hot day when fields were rank

    With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

    Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

    To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

    Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

    Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked

    On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

    The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

    Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

    I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

    Were

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