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The Poems of Seamus Heaney
This definitive 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.
Seamus Heaney's voice is like no other—"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker). Published in a single volume for the first time, the collected poems of Heaney is a testament to that unforgettable voice, and to the breadth and beauty of the Nobel laureate's long and brilliant career, from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), to poems written for Human Chain (2010), his twelfth and final book.
Seamus Heaney's voice is like no other—"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker). Published in a single volume for the first time, the collected poems of Heaney is a testament to that unforgettable voice, and to the breadth and beauty of the Nobel laureate's long and brilliant career, from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), to poems written for Human Chain (2010), his twelfth and final book.
1296 pages, Hardcover
Published November 18, 2025
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366 people want to read
About the author
Seamus Heaney
380 books1,091 followersWorks of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections
Wintering Out
(1972) and
Field Work
(1979) as well as a translation of
Beowulf
(1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 16, 2025
My heartfelt thanks to NetGalley & Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the opportunity to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This doorstopper volume comprises Seamus Heaney's every poetry collection plus all the poems published in between that didn't go into the definitive collections, as well as a handful of unpublished works, with really detailed and helpful commentaries describing publication history, influences, biographical context, parallels between poems, etc. (What it doesn't include is his translations, which can be found in other editions.)
This is a treat for Heaney's fans, but it's also a wonderful experience for any reader at the time when one mostly encounters poetry in the form of a single decontextualized poem here or there. Obviously, not every poet thinks in collections, but Heaney does, and it is rewarding to read collections for their architecture, so to speak, and get frissons of horror or delight from clashes between poems. For example, the earliest collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), revolves around the narrator's disconnect from his rural background as he grows up to be a poet. He can only approach nature as a linguistic construct ("Miss Walls would tell us how / The daddy frog was called a bullfrog", etc.), and agriculture or farming work through extensive metaphors ("Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory / Or solid as cement", butter like "coagulated sunlight"). His choice to write comes at a price: a break with the inherited role ("The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it"). This inner conflict culminates, I'd say, in "The Early Purges" and "Follower": the poem about drowning kittens ("on well-run farms pests have to be kept down"), uncomfortable as is, is made all the more uncomfortable by the narrator's suspicion, voiced in the very next poem, that he himself might have been a pest ("I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, / Yapping always").
Rather than being targeted towards the readers who are already into Heaney or poetry more generally, I feel like this might actually be a good starting point for someone who doesn't yet know if poetry is what makes them a happy reader: taken together, this reads like one of those long slow autobiographies that are gaining popularity now, penned by a very eloquent yet down-to-earth author, a long internal monologue unfolding over the years, a dig for roots that yields now a shrunken bog body, now a Viking ("skull-handler, parablist, smeller of rot"), now melodies and snippets of the old language.
This doorstopper volume comprises Seamus Heaney's every poetry collection plus all the poems published in between that didn't go into the definitive collections, as well as a handful of unpublished works, with really detailed and helpful commentaries describing publication history, influences, biographical context, parallels between poems, etc. (What it doesn't include is his translations, which can be found in other editions.)
This is a treat for Heaney's fans, but it's also a wonderful experience for any reader at the time when one mostly encounters poetry in the form of a single decontextualized poem here or there. Obviously, not every poet thinks in collections, but Heaney does, and it is rewarding to read collections for their architecture, so to speak, and get frissons of horror or delight from clashes between poems. For example, the earliest collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), revolves around the narrator's disconnect from his rural background as he grows up to be a poet. He can only approach nature as a linguistic construct ("Miss Walls would tell us how / The daddy frog was called a bullfrog", etc.), and agriculture or farming work through extensive metaphors ("Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory / Or solid as cement", butter like "coagulated sunlight"). His choice to write comes at a price: a break with the inherited role ("The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it"). This inner conflict culminates, I'd say, in "The Early Purges" and "Follower": the poem about drowning kittens ("on well-run farms pests have to be kept down"), uncomfortable as is, is made all the more uncomfortable by the narrator's suspicion, voiced in the very next poem, that he himself might have been a pest ("I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, / Yapping always").
Rather than being targeted towards the readers who are already into Heaney or poetry more generally, I feel like this might actually be a good starting point for someone who doesn't yet know if poetry is what makes them a happy reader: taken together, this reads like one of those long slow autobiographies that are gaining popularity now, penned by a very eloquent yet down-to-earth author, a long internal monologue unfolding over the years, a dig for roots that yields now a shrunken bog body, now a Viking ("skull-handler, parablist, smeller of rot"), now melodies and snippets of the old language.
November 15, 2025
I’m lucky, in more ways than one, that my copy of this title is digital: a print version of Seamus Heaney’s collected poems will surely bend even the toughest of wrists out of shape. Is it the sheer weight of poetry, including a generous cache of uncollected poems spaced out between the published collections? No: it’s something ‘hand-forged and heavy’ - history, mythology, love, birth, death, devotion, passion, tyranny, freedom, sloe gin and turnip-snedding. It’s less a book than an entire canon between hard covers.
For those like me who never studied the poet in a classroom, the chronological flow fascinates and instructs. Even the early work shows confidence and control: the early poem ‘Lint Water’ is the peer of the poems from Death of A Naturalist and closes with the image of dead trout with ‘bellies as white as linen tablecloths.’ While you can see him working through an influence or two - Gerard Manly Hopkins there (especially ‘October Thought‘), Patrick Kavanagh there. At worst the uncollected work backs-up a published poem: ‘MacKenna’s Saturday Night’, say, plows the same field as ‘Docker’, with its air of buried resentment and simmering menace (‘Mouth loose like an open waistband / On a porter belly, to-night / He argues loud, sleek pint in hand’). Heaney’s poetic scales were optimally calibrated from the start.
It’s common enough in Heaney criticism to note the absence of wit in the early published work. The unpublished work makes one thing loud and clear: it was always there. I hope some of the bawdier pieces help people see a newer dimension to their favourite poet, who rhymes about the ‘Rachmann of the arts’ coming to evict the hapless ‘from the reek of his own farts’ as well as the loftier, better-known lines about hope and history.
Unless I’m missing something, there seems to be a mistake in the ordering: ‘Bann Clay’ and anthology mainstay ‘Bogland’, say, are not uncollected poems; they were published in Door into the Dark and closed out that collection. Some may feel, as did the late John McGahern, that the collections from the 90s onward weren’t the peer of the earlier work, one should never overlook their versatility. The ‘Squarings’ sequence (from 1991’s Seeing Things - believe it or not, the term ‘squarings’ derives from playing marbles) strips out almost every idea of what a Heaney poem should be and shoots off into more uncharted, urgently spiritual territory. If you admire the technical gift that conjured the ‘trunk-lid fit’ of a ceiling or the water that ‘honeyed’ from an ancient pump, take a moment to ponder the strength it takes to put that gift down and try something different. I continue to draw fresh sustenance from later work like ‘Mint’ and all of the District and Circle collection.
Seamus Heaney’s Collected Poems deserve to endure forever, standing over the landscape of poetry as tall and enduring as a menhir.
For those like me who never studied the poet in a classroom, the chronological flow fascinates and instructs. Even the early work shows confidence and control: the early poem ‘Lint Water’ is the peer of the poems from Death of A Naturalist and closes with the image of dead trout with ‘bellies as white as linen tablecloths.’ While you can see him working through an influence or two - Gerard Manly Hopkins there (especially ‘October Thought‘), Patrick Kavanagh there. At worst the uncollected work backs-up a published poem: ‘MacKenna’s Saturday Night’, say, plows the same field as ‘Docker’, with its air of buried resentment and simmering menace (‘Mouth loose like an open waistband / On a porter belly, to-night / He argues loud, sleek pint in hand’). Heaney’s poetic scales were optimally calibrated from the start.
It’s common enough in Heaney criticism to note the absence of wit in the early published work. The unpublished work makes one thing loud and clear: it was always there. I hope some of the bawdier pieces help people see a newer dimension to their favourite poet, who rhymes about the ‘Rachmann of the arts’ coming to evict the hapless ‘from the reek of his own farts’ as well as the loftier, better-known lines about hope and history.
Unless I’m missing something, there seems to be a mistake in the ordering: ‘Bann Clay’ and anthology mainstay ‘Bogland’, say, are not uncollected poems; they were published in Door into the Dark and closed out that collection. Some may feel, as did the late John McGahern, that the collections from the 90s onward weren’t the peer of the earlier work, one should never overlook their versatility. The ‘Squarings’ sequence (from 1991’s Seeing Things - believe it or not, the term ‘squarings’ derives from playing marbles) strips out almost every idea of what a Heaney poem should be and shoots off into more uncharted, urgently spiritual territory. If you admire the technical gift that conjured the ‘trunk-lid fit’ of a ceiling or the water that ‘honeyed’ from an ancient pump, take a moment to ponder the strength it takes to put that gift down and try something different. I continue to draw fresh sustenance from later work like ‘Mint’ and all of the District and Circle collection.
Seamus Heaney’s Collected Poems deserve to endure forever, standing over the landscape of poetry as tall and enduring as a menhir.
October 14, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advance copy of this new collection which offers the complete works of one of Ireland's and the world's most famous poets, along with commentary, notes and a complete bibliography.
Even though I loved music, and was attending college to earn an English degree poetry was something that I never really cared for. I don't know if it was the elitism of the subject, with is many rules one rhyme and syllables, or if I was just not ready to understand. I did love music, and spent endless hours understanding lyrics, wondering how things worked so well. Poetry was a different animal. I don't have a moment in time where I suddenly went, hmm, this isn't bad. I do know it was Irish poetry that sparked an interest, maybe an interview somewhere that mentioned a work. Once I started though I started reading everything. And one of those i discovered was Seamus Heaney. I liked his simple seeming poems, ones about nature, and as I discovered a deep understanding of those who work with the soil. With his political works it was his understanding of the people who lived on the Earth's soil that I found moving. The Poems of Seamus Heaney by Seamus Heaney edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O'Donoghue with Matthew Hollis is a complete collection of the poet's works from the the earliest days until his final days, showing Heaney's growth, his interests and the skill that made him one of our most celebrated wordsmiths.
The book contains everything Heaney has published, again from earliest works with revisions, in some places and a section of uncollected poems, printed with the families permission. The book is huge, about 1,312 pages and is more of a tome than a book. The poems range from natural, stories of the Irish bogs, the people who work the Earth, and the Earth itself. Some are family, some are friends, some from the poet's imagination. There are political works, from the Irish Troubles that were so prevalent during his time, to world events, and the war crimes of Kosovo. Some of the works have been revised, which are noted, but most are printed as their were published.
The book is a collection of original works. Heaney was known for his many translations, there are included in a separate book, one that I have read and one that is also worth adding to one's collection. The poems here show growth, from early days of the angry young poet writing about familiar themes. To feeling for the Earth itself and the natural world. As the poet ages, so do the themes looking at the world, its many problems and the inner world of people, again with problems, hatreds and sometimes solutions. I don't think I have seen such a large collection of poems by one writer. There are a few stinkers, a few ok poems. However their are many that show why Heaney won the Noble Prize, poems that even now I can't help thinking about.
A really wonderful collection, perfect for fans. The scope of the work if just huge, as was the talent. One that can be read straight through, flipped over, or just opened randomly. Somehow a reader will be changed by what they find.
Even though I loved music, and was attending college to earn an English degree poetry was something that I never really cared for. I don't know if it was the elitism of the subject, with is many rules one rhyme and syllables, or if I was just not ready to understand. I did love music, and spent endless hours understanding lyrics, wondering how things worked so well. Poetry was a different animal. I don't have a moment in time where I suddenly went, hmm, this isn't bad. I do know it was Irish poetry that sparked an interest, maybe an interview somewhere that mentioned a work. Once I started though I started reading everything. And one of those i discovered was Seamus Heaney. I liked his simple seeming poems, ones about nature, and as I discovered a deep understanding of those who work with the soil. With his political works it was his understanding of the people who lived on the Earth's soil that I found moving. The Poems of Seamus Heaney by Seamus Heaney edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O'Donoghue with Matthew Hollis is a complete collection of the poet's works from the the earliest days until his final days, showing Heaney's growth, his interests and the skill that made him one of our most celebrated wordsmiths.
The book contains everything Heaney has published, again from earliest works with revisions, in some places and a section of uncollected poems, printed with the families permission. The book is huge, about 1,312 pages and is more of a tome than a book. The poems range from natural, stories of the Irish bogs, the people who work the Earth, and the Earth itself. Some are family, some are friends, some from the poet's imagination. There are political works, from the Irish Troubles that were so prevalent during his time, to world events, and the war crimes of Kosovo. Some of the works have been revised, which are noted, but most are printed as their were published.
The book is a collection of original works. Heaney was known for his many translations, there are included in a separate book, one that I have read and one that is also worth adding to one's collection. The poems here show growth, from early days of the angry young poet writing about familiar themes. To feeling for the Earth itself and the natural world. As the poet ages, so do the themes looking at the world, its many problems and the inner world of people, again with problems, hatreds and sometimes solutions. I don't think I have seen such a large collection of poems by one writer. There are a few stinkers, a few ok poems. However their are many that show why Heaney won the Noble Prize, poems that even now I can't help thinking about.
A really wonderful collection, perfect for fans. The scope of the work if just huge, as was the talent. One that can be read straight through, flipped over, or just opened randomly. Somehow a reader will be changed by what they find.
October 12, 2025
A comprehensive and definitive collection of Seamus Heaney’s poems, incorporating all 12 of his published collections, those poems published elsewhere and a selection of previously unpublished ones. Included are critical introductions and notes to each collection. It’s a landmark publication and an invaluable resource – and a joy to have and to hold.
October 17, 2025
Here's the thing-- I really like Seamus Heaney's work, and there is SO MUCH of it. Like, this guy was a profound and prolific writer, so I love a collection that has as much as it can inside. That being said, I just really enjoy his works.
Thanks for the ARC
Thanks for the ARC
November 15, 2025
I have read Seamus Heaney in the past but wow! This collection is such a treat! This is a terrific book that is quite nice to dip in and out of throughout the year. This is a gem of a collection that I highly recommend.
#ThePoemsofSeamusHeaney #NetGalley #FarrarStrausandGiroux
#ThePoemsofSeamusHeaney #NetGalley #FarrarStrausandGiroux
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews