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by: Seamus Heaney
List Price: $17.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.56 You Save: $5.44 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 821.914
EAN: 9780374526788
ISBN: 0374526788
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: October 25, 1999
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 104850
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
For Seamus Heaney, 'opened ground' is a necessity--a way of getting to the root of things. The book bearing that name spans three decades, beginning with 'Digging,' his exhilarating portrait of the artist as a young revolutionary. 'Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun,' Heaney boasts (although by the end of the poem, his weapon has metamorphosed into something closer to the spade his grandfather and father once relied upon). The last entry, the sonnet 'Postscript,' appears some 400 pages later, which makes Opened Ground a capacious selection of his work. But at this point Heaney requires the largest of hold-alls. There are beautiful, pastoral lyrics here, sequences such as 'Glanmore Sonnets' and 'Clearances,' and a multitude of love poems, not solely to his wife but to his parents and children. And in Heaney's hands, small domestic moments and objects--a scrabble board, a swing, a kite, a bed sawn in half to get it downstairs--invariably become both reality and soaring myth.
At the same time, his Ireland is the site of 'neighborly murders,' and the past and larger world he confronts is one threatened by history and brutal sectarianism. Heaney has declared, 'Fear is the emotion that the muse thrives on. That's always there'--and terror is pervasive in his 'land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, / Of open minds as open as a trap.' Many of his poems that explore the Troubles reflect his own considerable concern that he has long 'confused evasion and artistic tact.' Others might be termed self-reflexive, since Heaney uses them to unearth his own role. 'Kinship' features a simple, brilliant (not to mention canine!) simile: I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat.
In a later poem, 'From the Frontier of Writing,' he compares the struggle for inspiration to being stopped at a roadblock: 'And everything is pure interrogation / until a rifle motions you and you move / with guarded unconcerned acceleration.' Heaney's gift is dazzling, and would be almost unbearable were it not matched by vigilance, self-doubt, and regret--and his longing for the day in which 'justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.' --Kerry Fried
Product Description:
As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. 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)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: 'Crediting Poetry.'
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Dazzling and intense
Dazzling and intense works. Good overview of his output. Although this is not the Collected Poetry of Heaney it does contain almost all his best poems up to 1996, as well as his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture (a gem) and an excerpt from his play Cure a Troy. Essential poetry volume.
Rating: - Kind of interesting...
I needed the book for a class... I went in to reading it like it was going to be garbage... But it actually was a little bit interesting...
Rating: - He who makes English get up and dance...
If you have not read Seamus Heaney, then you are not in touch with what the English language is in its heart. Heaney's simple, unstrained word usage, coupled with a deep knowledge of the rich Anglo-Saxon which is our cornerstone, evokes a strength which comes not so much from what we see and know as from something which is rooted deeply in our psyches as Anglo-Europeans (or at least those living in and a part of such cultures). Heaney also brings to light the beauty of the ordinary, primarily by ... Read More
Rating: - Seamus Heaney's Poems
After currently studying the quality of Seamus Heaney's poems, i am quite sure that this book will not dissapoint you. The quality of Heaney's poems are somewhat outstanding, they are a shock, as you dont normally read poems of this sort, and once you read one, you have to read the others. One of my personal favourites is Mid-Term Break.
Written by Kirk Aged 14
Rating: - !!!THRILL-SPASM!!!
strong poems, there is a sadness and a resignation of fog that permeates these poems. this is a melancholy man, one for whom the all-pervading glue of inaction and paralysis bounds him to a bleak world, soiled and grey and drab. this is a weary poet, too nauseated with reality's bruised soldiers, slovenly rudeness, the uncouth glutton, the debauched fiend. i enjoy him, immerse myself in his dust-gloom, his inability to soar into elation and falcon-freedom.
author of Lorelei Pursued ... Read More
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