Contributor
O'Brien, Eugene, 1958- editor of compilation.
Imprint:Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2016]
Descriptionxiv, 403 pages ; 24 cm
Note:pt. I Heaney and Death -- 1. Surviving Death in Heaney's Human Chain / Andrew J. Auge -- 2. Death and Everyman: Imagining a "Not Unwelcoming Emptiness" / Magdalena Kay -- 3. Squarings / Helen Vendler -- pt. II Heaney's Later Style -- 4. The Freed Speech of "Equivocal Words": Seamus Heaney's Door into the Light / Michael R. Molino -- 5. Happening Once for Ever: Heaney's Late Style / Neil Corcoran -- 6. "The Whole of Me A-Patter": Image, Feeling, and Finding Form in Heaney's Late Work / Meg Tyler -- pt. III Translation and Transnational Poetics -- 7. "Renewed, Transfigured, in Another Pattern": Metaphor and Displacement in Seamus Heaney's Human Chain / Michael Parker -- 8. The Reluctant Transatlanticist: "Like a Weeping Willow Inclined to the Appetites of Gravity" / Elmer Kennedy-Andrews -- 9. Crediting Marvels or Taking Responsibility: Vocation and Declarations of Intent by Seamus Heaney after Seeing Things / Bernard O'Donoghue -- pt. IV Luminous Things and Gifts -- 10. Seamus Heaney's Gifts / Henry Hart -- 11. "Deep Down Things": The Inner Lives of Things in Later Heaney / Richard Rankin Russell -- 12. "Door into the Light": The Later Poems of Seamus Heaney / Stephen Regan -- pt. V Usual and Unusual Spaces -- 13. "Scatter-Eyed / And Daunted": The "Matrixial Gaze" in Seeing Things / Moynagh Sullivan -- 14. "Beyond Maps and Atlases": Transfiguration and Immanence in the Later Poems of Seamus Heaney / Daniel Tobin -- 15. The Poetics of Reverie and Revelation in the Last Poems / Rand Brandes -- 16. "The Door Stands Open": Liminal Spaces in the Later Heaney / Eugene O'Brien.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Note:""The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances": The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney brings together sixteen of the most prominent scholars who have written on Seamus Heaney to examine the Nobel prize-winner's later poetry from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to Heaney's early and middle poems--the Bog Poems in particular--this book focuses on the poetry collected in Heaney's Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010) as a thematically connected set of writings. The starting point of the essays in this collection is that these later poems can be grouped in terms of style, theme, approach, and intertextuality. They develop themes that were apparent in Heaney's earlier work, but they also break with these themes and address issues that are radically different from those of the earlier collections. The essays are divided into five sections, focusing on ideas of death, the later style, translation and transnational poetics, luminous things and gifts, and usual and unusual spaces. A number of the contributors see Heaney as stressing the literary over the actual and as always looking at the interstices and positions of liminality and complexity. His use of literary references in his later poetry exemplifies his search for literary avatars against whom he can test his own ideas and with whom he can enter into an aesthetic and ethical dialogue. The essayists cover a great deal of Heaney's debts to classical and modern literature--in the original languages and in translations--and demonstrate the degree to which the streets on which Heaney walked and wrote were two-way: he was influenced by Virgil, Petrarch, Milosz, Wordsworth, Keats, Rilke and others and, in turn, had an impact on contemporary poets. This remarkable collection will appeal to scholars and literary critics, undergraduates as well as graduate students, and to the many
Note:general readers of Heaney's poetry. "The scope and remit of 'The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances' position it to make a welcome and timely contribution to scholarship on Seamus Heaney, whose death in 2013 brought to an end over five decades of creative output. Eugene O'Brien's decision to devote a collection of essays to the later poetry thus promises to fill a gap in 'Heaney Studies,' extending coverage and suggesting some new directions in critical methodology." --Jason David Hall, University of Exeter"-- Provided by publisher.
