New Selected Poems 1988-2013

by Seamus Heaney

New Selected Poems 1988-2013 provides an unrivalled account of a period of work that was crowned by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Together with its earlier, sibling volume, it completes the arc of a remarkable career.

Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney discussed with his publisher the prospect of a companion volume to his landmark New Selected Poems 1966-1987 aimed at presenting the second half of his career, 'from Seeing Things onwards', as he foresaw it. Although he was unable to complete a edition/selection, he left behind selections that have been followed here. New Selected Poems 1988-2013 reprints the author's chosen poems from his later years, beginning with his ground-breaking volume Seeing Things (1991), his two Whitbread Books of the Year, The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999), and his multi-nominated, prize-winning volumes, Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). The edition concludes with two posthumously published works.

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Audiobook, Nobel Prize, Literature

240 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2014

About the author

Works 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.

Reviews

[Lynne King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friends in Ireland gave me this book and insisted that I read it. I was immediately suspicious. I never lend, never mind give my books away - they are precious to me (I actually have a copy of one of my books by Seneca currently residing in the Congo! I was really upset to lose this but on reflection I thought that there might be someone there who loved it!)

Well, it's obvious that my friends gave it to me because this book is quite superb! On the whole, I'm very careful in my selection of poetry but the poems here just did something to me. Touched my soul in fact.

I actually prefer poems that rhyme. Does that make me a literary heathen?

A super book!

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master poet at the pinnacle of his powers. Truly enriching work. While it’s true most of this has been collected elsewhere, this volume is worth having for his final poem alone, which isn’t collected anywhere else (to the best of my knowledge) and is truly beautiful.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems to be savored and read slowly and out loud. The last poem is a gem, In Time.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only poet on the Faber list so popular his selected poems had to be split into two books. Presumably this volume invalidates the expanded edition of curriculum mainstay Selected Poems 1966-1987. Along with that volume, Opened Ground and 100 Poems, this is the fourth selection of Heaney’s poems in print. I wonder about the size of his future collected poems: it will surely be the size of a menhir.

I don’t think it unfair to say that the most memorable poems are in the earlier volume - ‘Digging’, ‘Mid-Term Break’, ‘Bogland’, ‘The Tollund Man’, the sonnet sequence ‘Clearances’ and ‘Mossbawn.’

It is commendable, though, how Heaney refuses to park his bum on his justly-awarded laurels. From the late 80s, he turns more towards fables and parables, not dissimilar to the ones the Soviet dissident poets used to fox the authorities. This means a turn away from the natural world evoked so powerfully in the earlier work. ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’ and ‘Mint’ stand out in this vein. The ‘squarings’ sequence is perhaps the biggest departure from his default mode, metrically and thematically.

As with the first volume, translations are included, as with selections from his masterful version of Beowulf. There are some surprising omissions. One of the few stand-out poems from Heaney’s anaemic 2001 collection Electric Light is ‘On His Work in the English Tongue’ (about Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters). It’s not here and it should be.

The poems from the District and Circle collection show a clear return to form and form the best work of Heaney’s late career. A private poem to the author’s family closes out the collection.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

From "In the Attic,"where the aging poet recalls fond memories of "Treasure Island":

As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness
Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,

As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

[Marcas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heaney substantially unveils what it means to attend to the real world, visible and invisible. Evident throughout his poems- whether the emphasis is on the more immediate and fleeting, as in Postscript, or the more careful contours of poems such as St Kevin and The Blackbird- are couthy commands for our attention to catch our hearts off guard and blow them open.

Seamus is like many an old Ulster country uncle, regaling future generations around the parching hearth. He serves his adulated purpose with a warmth of his own, and by voice and disposition in equal measure. The Derry bard speaks bonny verses stamped through with a pessimistic optimism derived from a hard life in a troubled land. And as a semi-exile to the rustic Wicklow highlands.

Seamus excels in part because of those very trials of death and discord belonging to his beloved land, personal tragedies, and life's sundry seasons, and turns to stoke the human and creative embers of the younger inheritors of the poetic covenant as poet and as teacher. Succeeding quietus and the queries which accompany it with themes of new life and redemption, pilgrim tales drawn from the well of a deep faith in forms and filí.

This late collection takes us down the road with a master of the art, reflecting on a long life well-lived. Heaney's tone, slow rhythmic speech and cool assonance yield a fertile audtiory experience. Ultimately resolving the tilling of the boy-poet to be present to the real earth and his desire to speak with the filí of the past.

Memory Eternal!

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.
Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,
A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.
Touch the crossbeam, drive iron in a wall,
Hang a line to verify the plumb
From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.
Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.
Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.
Make your study the unregarded floor.
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

that was a guy who was very good at poems.

[Justin Wiggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased my copy of this at Daunt Books in London, England. I enjoyed it immensely! My favorite poem from this volume is the one called "Postscript." I read it aloud at The Bag -End Cafe at a C.S.Lewis Oxbridge event recently. Seamus Heaney is an amazing Irish poet.

[Michael Legge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shame he dies in the end.

[༺Kiki༻ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The audiobook, narrated by Heaney himself, is perfection.

You might also enjoy:
✱ At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver
✱ Many Miles: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver
✱ New and Selected Poems, Volume One
✱ New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
✱ Upstream: Select Essays
✱ House of Light
✱ The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
✱ New Collected Poems

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Heaney feels like going home, to all the things that were ever familiar, and seeing them anew. I agree with a another reviewer who described Heaney's poems as a voice, rather than a style. Read the poems aloud! Break them free of silence.

[Sanjuro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read each of these poems in their original collections. Reading them in this format confirmed for me my original feelings; of the latter half of Heaney's career, the poems of "The Spirit Level" are my favorite, although there are some beautiful poems featured here from the other collections. Conversely, "Seeing Things" is my least favorite Heaney collection, and the first 50 pages of this book derive from that one. Personally, I enjoy the first half of Heaney's career much more than the second, so I favor the previous volume of collected works over this one, but Heaney is one of my favorite all time poets, so his lesser work is better than the best work of most other writers.

[Jay Rafferty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This I have learned: a book of poetry is like a bowl of punch, you should only dip in when your thirsty, not chug the bowl. Reading it all in succession was overwhelming and the first half admirably washed over my mind, in one ear and out the other. That is more my fault than the poet’s.

But as we all know Heaney is a masterful poet and translator. The best piece in this book is undoubtedly the sections of Beowulf. His command of language in these poems is as humble and powerful as the hand the wrote them.

[Horatian (amy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a Seamus Heaney stan account.

[Obetta Maurice · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant work from a brilliant poet

[Peter McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I know Heaney’s earlier career incredibly well, I’d never properly sat down with his later stuff before, and it was a revelation: these are amazing. (Well, not all of them—‘Audenesque’ sucks.) Many of the best are written by Heaney the classics student, who I feel very at home with: he was no scholar, but could use Latin poetry as common knowledge to express himself to others—exactly as I did with classmates aged seventeen, using Heaney’s own Field Work: Poemsrather than Virgil. Of course, we were making shitty jokes about ‘mauve stars’, not composing works of brilliance like the first ‘Sonnet from Hellas’, ‘Mycenae Lookout’, ‘Route 110’… Earlier this year, I suggested that Heaney’s brilliance in Station Island came from the dialectic of striving after unattainable knowledge. But it is now apparent to me that in the late 1980s Heaney managed to take the brilliance he’d developed and leave the difficulties of the dialectic behind entirely—as he put it, he simply ‘straightened up’. How he did this I don’t know: the classics clearly helped, but he could do without them. I dream of my speech sounding exactly like ‘Whitby-sur-Moyola’, with its learnedness and its Ulsterisms reinforcing each other perfectly.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first collection I have read from Seamus Heaney and I, for the most part, found it very enjoyable. I liked the rapid fire comma separated phrases that rattled off quickly adding to the effect of the poem. The prose poems were not the best in the collection. The "Pitchfork" takes a simple utilitarian tool and puts it on the same level as Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Heaney also gives an excellent rendition of Beowulf. The mention of Han-Shan's Cold Mountain took me back to Kerouac's Dharma Bums. A collection of sonnets are included. Heaney mixes traditional poetry with some great storytelling in prose poetry.

Detailed review after a second reading.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Seamus Heaney's poetry and I have done since we did one of his poems at school. I love his voice so I read this as I listened to the audio for the full experience, which was great.

This includes a couple of selections from his Beowulf translation, which I like a lot. Beowulf was meant to be read aloud so hearing Heaney read it was a good time.

If you want to get your teeth into some excellent modern poetry then this isn't a bad selection to start off with. He writes so well about landscape and the impact of landscape.

[Toby · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent selection. Heaney never disappoints. Virgil crops up a few times and I'm pleased that I had read his translation of Aeniad book VI. Heaney has the ability to put just the right word - not always an obvious one- in just the right place. At times the fact that the poems were selected meant that I felt that I was missing a greater continuity in some of the collections. I felt this particularly with Squarings. I have now acquired the very recently published complete collected poems although when I will have a spare decade to read through those is another question.

[Bridget Latter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great selection from an obviously talented and intellectual poet. I wanted more from some of the poems such that a second patient reading or a better knowledge of classical epics might give me. I see why many reviewers say Heaney's poems are too celebral for their taste.

Still, some of the poems spoke to me immediately and i keep returning to them, notably:
Lupins
Fosterling
The Rain Stick
A Call
Uncoupled
Nonce Words

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This rather salt-of-the-earthy tome took me quite a while to plow through. I enjoyed pausing and taking time with some of the poems--really getting into the Irish dialect and definition of things. Other poems didn't do too much for me. Heaney, for me, is one that I would actually rather study than read lightly. Still masterful.

[Magdalena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely marvelous. Seamus Heaney's words touched me more than anything I've ever read and everybody should delve into his work as it will not only broaden your literary horizon but enlighten you in a way that you thought not possible.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audio version read by Heaney himself. These poems were beautifully and expressively read.

[Michael Rickard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful selection of poetry. I had to read this for a graduate level poetry class and I was pleasantly surprised. Heaney can take the most ordinary event and make it into a riveting poem.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems to study in the class, and then maybe read on your own. Reading the whole thing back-to-back can be a tiring experience, so unlike his smaller collections of poems.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite Irish authors/poets. This collection is superb.

[Jolanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very vivid descriptions which I really liked. Got this as a birthday gift some time ago, but recently realised I never finished it. Should've done that earlier, really amazing poems.

[Briana Rodriguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is probably actually really good but I fear I’m not literate enough to get it

[Philip Dodd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, so I thought I would read a book of his poems. New Selected Poems 1988-2013 is a collection of fine, meditative poems. They are very much rooted in the ground and what is called the real world. There was no lift to higher ground, the world of the spirit that the Victorian Romantic poets explored. That is true of much modern poetry that I have read. It seems close to landscape painting, very good at describing what can be seen in fine detail with always the correct words chosen. Sometimes while reading the poems I wished they would lift, take flight, but they never did. There are many references to Classical Greek poetry in the poems. I understood some but not all of them. Clarity is something not many modern poets strive for. Anyone who likes finely written poetry would enjoy reading this book.