The Derry poet's New Selected Poems 1966- 1987 and New Selected Poems 1988-2013 have just been published by Faber & Faber.
“ His is close-up poetry – close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions, “ writes John Banville on the jacket for the first of these collections. “Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does.”
New Selected Poems 1966- 1987 was the poet’s own selection which first appeared in 1990. Among the poems drawn from his first book, Death of A Naturalist (1966) are Digging, Mid-Term Break, and the wonderful, if somewhat overlooked Personal Helicon, which explored the early impulse to write. The poem played with his childhood fascination with wells, he was `big-eyed Narcissus’ in these early reflections. The verses rose to a firm conclusion, felicitously expressed:
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
New Selected Poems 1988-2013 was also selected by Seamus himself, although he had not completed the full edition at the time of his passing in August 2013. Selections are drawn from Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996) Beowulf (1999) Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and his final book, Human Chain (2010).
The selection concludes with the Nobel laureate’s final poem, In Time whose marvellous symmetry encompasses frailty and transience and its opposite, the energy of new life. The verses are dedicated to his grand-daughter Síofra and this is the opening verse:
Energy, balance, outbreak:
Listening to Bach
I saw you years from now
(more years than I’ll be allowed)
Your toddler wobbles gone,
A sure and grown woman.
Paddy Kehoe
