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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 October 9, 2025
About the author
Seamus Heaney
395 books1,131 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 - 15 of 15 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plus all the poems published in between that didn't go into the definitive collections, as well as a handful of unpublished works, with really detailed and helpful commentaries describing publication history, influences, biographical context, parallels between poems, etc.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.
June 20, 2026
Now I've read everything Seamus Heaney published: his collections are great, his uncollected poems are either bad (frankly) uninteresting, or good but missing something special. There was only one of his uncollected poems i thought lived up to his own standards. The lesson there, I guess, is he had a good eye for what he knew was his best work.
August 1, 2026
Heaney said this: Fundamentally, what I want from poetry is the preciousness and foundedness of wise feeling become eternally posthumous in perfect cadence. Good poetry reminds you that writing is writing, it’s not just expectoration or self-regard or a semaphore for self’s sake. You want it to touch you at the melting point below the breastbone and the beginning of the solar plexus. You want something sweetening and at the same time something unexpected, something that has come through constraint into felicity.
He lived there in the unsayable lights. He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon And green fields greying on the windswept heights. ‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over With perfect mist and peaceful absences…’
Unsayable lights. Dust-drunk cobwebs. Mud-nest, home-rest rafter. Heaven-hue plum-blue. And I live times distilled from time past. Sibilant penumbra. Mellowed clarities. Knuckle-gnarl of branches.
Oh my. What a way with words. I slogged through this huge outpouring of words, and found something powerful in the words, but the themes and topics were less so. The poet was a product of a time and space that isn’t mine although any nature poem is part of me, so there were some. But obviously a master and a worthwhile brain exercise.
SONNET VII FROM THE GLANMORE SONNETS
Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Étoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven’,
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.
I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
And slept that night near goatbells in the mists.
THE OTTER
When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.
I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.
I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.
Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.
My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,
Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck.
And suddenly you’re out,
Back again, intent as ever,
Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,
Printing the stones.
OCTOBER THOUGHT
Starling thatch watches, and sudden swallow
Straight shoots to its mud-nest, home-rest rafter,
Up through dry, dust-drunk cobwebs, like laughter
Flitting the roof of black-oak, bog-sod and rods of willow;
And twittering flirtings in the eaves as sparrows quarrel.
Haystalks straw-broken and strewn
Hide, hear mice mealing the grain, gnawing strong
The iron-bound, swollen and ripe-round corn-barrel.
Minute movement millionfold whispers twilight
Under heaven-hue plum-blue and gorse pricked with gold,
And through the knuckle-gnarl of branches, poking the night
Comes the trickling tinkle of bells, well in the fold.
NOSTALGIA IN THE AFTERNOON
Great blue-scooped sky, arching above me,
Breeze-winnowed, shell-sounding and bubbling white
With the smooth soap-slip caressing of pot-bellied clouds,
I leap towards your high intangible blueness
With Gothic agility.
Up above now, widely wheeling in free cool curvings,
The sky is talking to me, and soft whorls of feathery
cloud-cream lick over my skin:
Now I am all days spent close to the warm breathing earth,
Here in a firm rounded moment, suspended in swaying space,
And I live times distilled from time past.
RILKE: THE APPLE ORCHARD
Come just after the sun has gone down, watch
This deepening of green in the evening sward:
Is it not as if we’d long since garnered
And stored within ourselves a something which
From feeling and from feeling recollected,
From new hope and half-forgotten joys
And from an inner dark infused with these,
Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered
Under trees here like trees in a Dürer woodcut –
Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years
Gravid in them until the fruit appears –
Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted
In the knowledge that no matter how above
Measure or expectation, all must be
Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly
Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in quiet resolve.
RILKE: AFTER THE FIRE
Early autumn morning hesitated,
Shying at newness, an emptiness behind
Scorched linden trees still crowding in around
The moorland house, now just one more wallstead
Where youngsters in a pack from god knows where
Went rip-roaring wild and yelled and wrecked.
Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,
The son of the place, and with a long forked stick
Dragged an out of shape old can or kettle
From under hot, charred, half-consumed house-beams;
And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,
Turned to the others present, at great pains
To make them realise what had stood so.
For now that it was gone, it all seemed
Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.
And he was changed: as from a far-off land.
He lived there in the unsayable lights. He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon And green fields greying on the windswept heights. ‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over With perfect mist and peaceful absences…’
Unsayable lights. Dust-drunk cobwebs. Mud-nest, home-rest rafter. Heaven-hue plum-blue. And I live times distilled from time past. Sibilant penumbra. Mellowed clarities. Knuckle-gnarl of branches.
Oh my. What a way with words. I slogged through this huge outpouring of words, and found something powerful in the words, but the themes and topics were less so. The poet was a product of a time and space that isn’t mine although any nature poem is part of me, so there were some. But obviously a master and a worthwhile brain exercise.
SONNET VII FROM THE GLANMORE SONNETS
Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Étoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven’,
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.
I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
And slept that night near goatbells in the mists.
THE OTTER
When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.
I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.
I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.
Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.
My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,
Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck.
And suddenly you’re out,
Back again, intent as ever,
Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,
Printing the stones.
OCTOBER THOUGHT
Starling thatch watches, and sudden swallow
Straight shoots to its mud-nest, home-rest rafter,
Up through dry, dust-drunk cobwebs, like laughter
Flitting the roof of black-oak, bog-sod and rods of willow;
And twittering flirtings in the eaves as sparrows quarrel.
Haystalks straw-broken and strewn
Hide, hear mice mealing the grain, gnawing strong
The iron-bound, swollen and ripe-round corn-barrel.
Minute movement millionfold whispers twilight
Under heaven-hue plum-blue and gorse pricked with gold,
And through the knuckle-gnarl of branches, poking the night
Comes the trickling tinkle of bells, well in the fold.
NOSTALGIA IN THE AFTERNOON
Great blue-scooped sky, arching above me,
Breeze-winnowed, shell-sounding and bubbling white
With the smooth soap-slip caressing of pot-bellied clouds,
I leap towards your high intangible blueness
With Gothic agility.
Up above now, widely wheeling in free cool curvings,
The sky is talking to me, and soft whorls of feathery
cloud-cream lick over my skin:
Now I am all days spent close to the warm breathing earth,
Here in a firm rounded moment, suspended in swaying space,
And I live times distilled from time past.
RILKE: THE APPLE ORCHARD
Come just after the sun has gone down, watch
This deepening of green in the evening sward:
Is it not as if we’d long since garnered
And stored within ourselves a something which
From feeling and from feeling recollected,
From new hope and half-forgotten joys
And from an inner dark infused with these,
Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered
Under trees here like trees in a Dürer woodcut –
Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years
Gravid in them until the fruit appears –
Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted
In the knowledge that no matter how above
Measure or expectation, all must be
Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly
Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in quiet resolve.
RILKE: AFTER THE FIRE
Early autumn morning hesitated,
Shying at newness, an emptiness behind
Scorched linden trees still crowding in around
The moorland house, now just one more wallstead
Where youngsters in a pack from god knows where
Went rip-roaring wild and yelled and wrecked.
Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,
The son of the place, and with a long forked stick
Dragged an out of shape old can or kettle
From under hot, charred, half-consumed house-beams;
And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,
Turned to the others present, at great pains
To make them realise what had stood so.
For now that it was gone, it all seemed
Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.
And he was changed: as from a far-off land.
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.
March 18, 2026
Seamus Heaney was undoubtedly one of the great poets of our time. His work feels completely accessible, yet has depths that require critics like Helen Vendler to plumb. This is a magisterial collection of Heaney’s work, all in one place either for academic enjoyment or, if you are like me, for just opening to a random page and enjoying whatever is there. This is a hefty tome, and expensive at the bookstore, but it should be on every poetry lover’s shelf.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC
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
Did Not Finish
June 24, 2026While I was impressed by the volume of unique word choices and definitively Irish sound, Seamus’s work sounds far better read aloud by the author than in my head, if only due to the voice being so distinctively his. I wasn’t drawn to this collection otherwise.
March 9, 2026
Wonderful, but also …. The editors printed their names nearly as big as Heaney’s on the spine lol
March 25, 2026
In this book we find all twelve volumes Heaney published in his lifetime as well as many unpublished verses. This is a remarkable reference book to have in any library, public or personal.
April 26, 2026
My bible.
Did Not Finish
June 3, 2026His landscapes and farmscapes were the best. Stopped a page 190. Had to return to Library.
July 3, 2026
The greatest poet of the rural Irish land and people.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews