Product Description
This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987).'His is 'close-up' poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does.' John Banville'More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of.' John Carey ... Read more

Product Description
Winner of the Whitbread Prize, Seamus Heaney's translation "accomplishes what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right" (New York Times Book Review). The translation that "rides boldly through the reefs of scholarship" (The Observer) is combined with first-rate annotation. No reading knowledge of Old English is assumed. Heaney's clear and insightful introduction to Beowulf provides students with an understanding of both the poem's history in the canon and Heaney's own translation process. "Contexts" provides a rich selection of material on Anglo-Saxon and early Northern culture. "Criticism" features eight essays carefully chosen for their relevance to undergraduate readers, including a full discussion of the Old English poem that lies behind Heaney's translation. Contributors include J.R.R. Tolkien, John Leyerle, Jane Chance, Roberta Frank, Fred C. Robinson, Thomas Hill, Leslie Webster, and Daniel Donoghue. A Glossary of Proper Names and a Selected Bibliography are included.

About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Beowulf
O.K. any highbrows should not read this review. I saw the movie Beowulf and at the end I was left hanging so I read the book and it was nothing like the Movie (surprize)But I loved it.

Hidden political propaganda by Heaney?
So Heaney won the Noble prize? Then I guess this translation of Beowulf must be politically correct (PC). Because the Swedish Nobel prize committee only nominate authors who have a politically correct moral message in their writings.

This means that Heaney would tone down any excessive nationalism, and hostility towards other ethnic groups, of the original Beowulf. And use the story for his own idealistic purposes, by adding left-wing liberal values to the text, in an attempt to influence the readers with a political multicultural message for Europe's future, in which, for example, citizens will have to accept the colonizing spread of Islam.

Ira Abrams review below seems to confirm this.

If this is the case, then I prefer, for artistry's sake (and for political reasons), another version.

The supplements helped me appreciate this classic even more
I am a Beowulf "newbie". I purchased Chickering's translation two and a half weeks ago. I liked the poem so much that I wanted a different translation. I picked Beowulf: A Verse Translation because it was affordable and contained literary crticisms.

This edition is well -worth its money. I read through the supplements, including passages from contemporary Anglo-Saxon works and literary criticisms. (Including Tolkien's famous lecture on the three monsters.) I learned so much about Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Celtic culture. (Well, enough to whet my appetite!)

I value Heaney's use of Ulster dialect. Footnotes include the modern English equivalents. The use of the Ulster dialect gives this ancient poem a bit more "ancient" flavor.

Bonus is the wonderful photographs complementing the criticism on Beowulf and archaeology.

Sometimes it's good to be critical
I had already bought Heaney's "A New Verse Translation" before I needed to buy this edition for a university class.That said, if you're only looking for a translation of the poem with no frills, buy the "New Verse Translation" because it's got the text in parallel with the original Anglo-Saxon.But if you're interested in Beowulf criticism and related anthropology then pick up this edition, because half the book is critical essays, including Tolkein's seminal work.

Excellent edition
This is a beautiful translation that captures the tone and tenor of Old English. Although it eschews the alliterative line essential to Old English poetry, Heaney's rendering is magically evocative of the somber stoicism and occasionally wry understatement of this seminal poem. The critical commentary provides a nice general scholarly apparatus that helps one contextualize and better appreciate the poem and the achievement of Heaney as a modern day "scop" through whom the original - alas anonymous - poet speaks. ... Read more

Product Description
In this volume of critical essays, Seamus Heaney scrutinizes the poetry of many masterful poets. Throughout the collection, Heaney's gifts as a wise and genial reader are exercised with characteristic exactness, and we are reminded, above all, of the essentially gratifying nature of poetry itself.
... Read more

Product Description
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's first collection of prose, Preoccupations, begins with a vivid account of his early years on his father's farm in Northern Ireland and his coming of age as a student and teacher in Belfast. Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.
... Read more

Product Description
"Sweeney Astray" is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work "Buile Suibhne". Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a demented flying creature at the Battle of Moira. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Magnificent
"Sweeney Astray" is a masterpiece on many levels: for the complex weave of its themes to the lyrical quality of its prose--accentuated greatly, of course, by Seamus Heaney's virtuoso translation.

We follow mad Sweeney in his crazed wanderings through the forest and hills, torn within himself by his love of the wild and his incurable loneliness. The tale is presented as chunks of narrative interspersed with segments of poetry, their quiet, melancholy beauty evoking the sounds of windsong and rain.

There is an ethereal quality to this text that makes it difficult to describe. Although it would seem to have a storyline, in reality it is a song, and each "event" a new strain of music. Sweeney's longing for his lost life as a man and king, even as he is unable to stay away from his beloved wilds of Glen Bolcain, illustrate the conflict between the desire for peaceful conformity and for transcendence. This conflict is echoed in the struggle that was ensuing in Ireland even as this work was being written, the struggle between the Celtic religion and the new influx of Christianity.

In this way does "Sweeney Astray" illuminate a historic revolution, while at the same time presenting themes that span eternity. ... Read more

Product Description
This critically-acclaimed body of work brings together roughly 100 poems culled by Seamus Heaney from nine of his collections. "It is a retrospective event, by definition selective, but also full-bodied and useful."--Edward Hirsch, Boston Globe.Amazon.com Review
Seamus Heaney was the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize, and thiscollection reveals the range, sureness, and quality of hisachievements. Includes the complete and revised version of his longpoem, "Station Island," as well as a number of prose poems previouslyunpublished in the U.S. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent
Seamus Heaney is an Irish treasure in literature. His works display the "concrete reality" that he aimed for in his poetry. My favorite poem is "Digging". He is talented in fusing agric./pol./soc./religion themes together in one poem.

good portrait of Heaney's development
Heaney's "Selected Poems" shows a good picture of the poet's development up to "Station Island" and the sonnets of Glanmore and Clearances.Like Yeats, Heaney had to go through a few volumes before he "became good":except for "The Tolland Man," the poems selected from his first four collections are flat, even the much-anthologized "Digging," which perseveres in anthologies only because it illustrates Heaney's overall philosophy.With the bog poems from "North," Heaney comes into his own, and he has managed to remain at this consistent level of excellence since then. ... Read more

Product Description
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was not only Ireland's greatest poet but one of the most influential voices in world literature in the twentieth century. His extraordinary work, in the words of this volume's editor Seamus Heaney, encourages us to be more resolutely and abundantly alive, whatever the conditions. Other volumes in this series include: "Auden", "Betjemen", "Eliot", "Hughes", and "Plath". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Beautiful book!!
I get compliments on these all of the time. The covers are a bit padded, which I did not know at the time of purchase. Beautiful design. ... Read more

Product Description
An assessment of Heaney's poetry and prose, tracing his "contrary progressions" through phases of affirmation and despair. Hart explores Heaney's work from the 1960s to "The Haw Lantern", seeking in the poems those elements and traits that Heaney allusively indicates in his prose. ... Read more

Product Description
The powerful collection by the bestselling translator of Beowulf

In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air
That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold
In the everything flows and steady go of the world.
--from "Perch"

Seamus Heaney's collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world and revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least, the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding -- whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.

Electric Light ranges from short takes to conversation poems. The pre-Socratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the elegizing of friends and fellow poets. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign things their proper names; once again Heaney can be heard exting his word hoard and roll call in this, his eleventh collection.
Amazon.com Review
Seamus Heaney's 11th collection of poems, Electric Light,continues his excavation of childhood, his vivifying love of nature, andhis quest into the meaning of poetry itself in an utterly pleasurable andsatisfying way. As the poet squares up to his own mortality, many of the poems are dedicated to the memory of lost friends and poets like JosephBrodsky. Yet the urgency and optimism of new birth is a lively presencein the book too. "Bann Valley Eclogue," for example, prophesizes a timewhen "old markings / Will avail no more to keep east bank from west. / Thevalley will be washed like the new baby." And in "Out of the Bag," thechild narrator believes that newborns emerge from the doctor's bag--or, inone hallucinatory moment, from the washbasin: "The baby bits all cometogether swimming / Into his soapy big hygienic hands."

Childhood is an unfading, unfailing element in Heaney's work, and is caughtwith a breathless vitality. "The Real Names" revisits the schoolboys whoplayed Shakespeare: Owen Kelly as "Sperrins Caliban" with "turnip fists,"and "Catatonic Bobby X" as Feste, "with his curled-in shoulders andcabbage-water eyes / speechlessly rocking." Here is the humor, exactness,scope, and tenderness of Heaney at his best. His language is as muscular andinventive as ever. Idiom meets innovation in compounds like rut-shudderyand flood-slubs--and waver is neatly subverted into a noun in "Perch." Throughout Electric Light, Heaney demonstrates exactly howpoetry can capture the "flows and steady go of the world." --CherrySmyth ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Enjoyable Heaney B-sides
If Seamus Heaney was a recording artist instead of a poet, the poems of Electric Light would be B-sides: many of them are well-executed, all of them have elements of the linguistic verve and elegance for which Heaney is renowned, but none of them are stick-out spectacular.That is, if Heaney's already spectacular body of work is setting the par.
Poems such as "Montana" are concise stories that lyrically weave the nature of a person, a relationship, and the past together with lines that make good fodder for a week or two's rolling over in the mind: "Even then he was like an apparition/ A rambler from the Free State and a gambler/ All eyes as the pennies rose and slowed/ On Sunday mornings"; others, like "Perch" are meanderings into the sonic quality of words, without so much as coherent sentence: "Guzzling the Current, against it, all muscle and slur/ In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air/ That is water".But other poems are, for Heaney, largely unexceptional.
Electric Light is a good collection of poems for a lazy Sunday afternoon: there are plenty of poems to contemplate poolside, but not enough hits for this collection of b-sides to go platinum.

A solid book from a master, with a few ruminations on Beowulf
This was Heaney's first book of original verse after completing his sublime translation of Beowulf. If you love his rendering of that epic poem as much as I do, you will share my delight when you discover allusions to Beowulf and reflections on the translation process sitting snugly in poems throughout Electric Light.

not his best work
the latest collection of poetry from seamus heaney isn't his best work. in fact, if you aren't familiar with his work you'd do better starting with opened ground. there is a pensive tone throughout the collection, and the entire second half is written for recently dead poets. when you read this you can see why he won the nobel, but i'd wait to read this after you've gone through his selected poems. and here are some other poets you may enjoy: dylan thomas, yeats, robert frost, r.s. gwynn, david mason

Elegiac but powerful and affecting
With "Electric Light", Seamus Heaney steps over, or rather blurs, the boundary between poet and audience. Although some of his earlier work has dealt with poetry from the writer's perspective, numerous works in this book are addressed to, dedicated to, or in memory of (and in some cases all three) other poets. At times, this can give this collection a somewhat elegiac tone, but Heaney's powerful, careful and affecting use of the English language shines throughout, particularly in "Audenesque", which manages to be a tribute to Auden, an elegy for Joseph Brodsky, and a fine exercise in meter and rhythm all in one.

As with previous collections, Heaney's memories of his childhood and youth in Ireland are cleverly intermixed with classical allusion and earthy modern notes. Overall, the tone of "Electric Light" is darker than that of, say "The Spirit Level" (the title poem, for example, has more substance and less enticing whimsy than his previous "A Sofa in the Forties") but this merely allows moments of fun, such as his "Glosses" - ten short pieces on various subjects- "The Real Names" and "Red, White, and Blue" to stand out more clearly than they might have otherwise.

Heaney has written and spoken eloquently on the "redress of poetry"- the purpose, the need and the drive of poetry to serve as a medium of communication and conversation in the modern, larger world as well as the classical, academic one. With its juxtaposition of poetic in-jokes, everyday observation and personal but not private reminiscence, "Electric Light" strikes a kind balance between these two worlds.

Value the works of an aging poet for what they are
Visit the following URL for my review of Electric Light:

http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/heaney.htm ... Read more

Product Description
In this collection of critical responses to Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney´s poetry, Elmer Andrews presents the debates surrounding the poet´s work and popular appeal. The writings gathered in this Columbia Critical Guide clarify and explore issues of cultural identity and nationality, as well as debates on the power of language and the function of verse. Beginning with Heaney´s early collection, Death of a Naturalist, the guide reviews and contextualizes material on successive volumes (including 1996´s The Spirit Level), so that students of Heaney´s verse will find an accessible pathway through the most important critical writings on this major poet. ... Read more

Product Description

" Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's entire body of work (including his recent volumes, Seeing Things and The Spirit Level ). It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations. According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of ""the center,"" a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent review of Heaneys work with keen insight.
Daniel Tobin,published poet and Professor of English,offers exceptional insight into the work of Heaney.This book offers both an excellent overview and a fresh perspective on the deepest meaning of Heaneys poetry from 1965to the present.Tobin advances Heaney scholarship to a new level,and makesit meaningful to student and scholar alike. ... Read more

Product Description
Based on a lecture by poet Seamus Heaney ... Read more

Product Description
Whether autobiographical, topical, or specifically literary, these writings circle the central preoccupying questions of Seamus Heaney's career: "How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and the contemporary world?"

Along with a selection from the poet's three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue, and The Redress of Poetry), the present volume includes Heaney's finest lectures and a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to radio commentaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets -- Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors and contemporaries -- Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, "an announcement of both excitement and possession."
Amazon.com Review
In addition to his well-regarded verse, Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney has amassed a body of prose works over the last 30-plus years, previously published chiefly in three separate books. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, offers a "best of" (of sorts) as Heaney sifts through previous writings and offers a variety of strong works, from memoir to lecture transcripts to literary criticism.

Long regarded as one of Northern Ireland's premier contemporary poets, this volume shows us that Heaney has a sharp critical eye as well, giving us probing analyses of his literary mentors (such as William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and W.B. Yeats), European poets (Edwin Muir, Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes to name but a few), and other prominent European and American poets (T.S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, Sylvia Plath). Additionally, Heaney includes pieces on the writing process and his evolution as a writer that are insightful and engaging. In "Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland," Heaney describes what the poet sets out to achieve:

In that liberated moment when the lyric discovers its buoyant completion, when the timeless formal pleasure comes to its fullness and exhaustion, in those moments of self-justification and self-obliteration the poet makes contact with the plane of consciousness where he is at once intensified in his being and detached from his predicaments.

Whether you're a fan of Heaney's poems or not, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 is an excellent critical resource--one into which it is well worth digging. --Michael Ferch ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An Excellent Collection
As a person of Irish descent, I am especially proud of Seamus Heaney's contribution to poetry and literature study.His voice is uniquely Northern Irish, but his understanding of that which makes language and literature deep spans the world--its ages and cultures.With a poet's vision, Heaney latches onto the resonance of words and images that explicate the human experience, in Icelandic sagas, Dante's verse, Milosz, or fellow Irish writers.

Heaney's aim in this collection of prose writings (some have been previously published and some are lectures) is to "celebrate and take possession" of poetry's excitement and exuberance.Each piece is autobiographical, in that his approach is not strictly the performance of formal literary criticism, but is rather the creative sojourn a poet can take into the depths of his own craft, to call the poetic spirit home.As he says, his central preoccupations are: How should a poet properly live and write?What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?

Heaney's leading article is "Mossbawn," which describes the County Derry in the 1940's--as an 'omphalos' or navel which marks the center of the world--whereby one gets the sense that Heaney is a young Stephen Dedalus attempting to locate himself in Ireland, his community, and the world at large.His sentences are rich and carefully worded to evoke just the proper provincial image.He talks about his first forays in reading literature, rhymes, and the formidable Byron and Keats.

The next piece, "from Feeling Into Words" talks about the craft of writing poetry--his "Digging"--lines from Wordsworth.The next articles in Section I are interesting and special--on T.S. Eliot, living in Belfast and No. Ireland, being an Irish student and writer who writes in an English language.

Section two engages various interests: English writers and poets, Yeats, No. Irish poets and poetry, Kavanagh, P. Larkin, Dante and modern poetry, Z. Herbert, W.H. Auden, R. Lowell, S. Plath, Kinsella, E. Muir, Marlowe, John Clare, H. MacDiarmid, D. Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle...," E. Bishop, and R. Burns.

Section Three: S. Smith, Calvino's "Mr. Palomar" (an excellent book and review of it), Norman MacCaig, Ted Hughes, and C. Milosz (who writes marvelous verse).

This is a superb collection.I also recommend Heaney's meditations on Frost.He always attempts to uncover--to 'dig into'--features in poetry that make it 'good,' and in so doing, he immerses himself in a loved craft and discipline, to create vibrant, poetic prose.One gets the feeling here that Heaney is showing-off his 'finders keepers' treasures--his favorites--his cherished agate marbles, which clink and rattle in a bag of sensuous word play.

A Five-Hundred Pound Gorilla of Poetry
I'm a fan of Heaney's poems, but I'm very uncomfortable with his status as a "major" literary figure on the world stage. The title of this book says it all. Heaney's career, as poet as well as critic, has consisted entirely of finding and keeping--rarely of making. He has been very successful at appropriating and synthesizing the ideas and techniques of others (esp. Lowell, Hopkins and Yeats) into a satisfying if never very original whole. In choosing this title, he apparently now sees fit to congratulate himself for it. Originality may not be the highest quality--how many are ever truly original?--but somebody of Heaney's prominence ought to do more than just recycle the successes of admired precursors. "Finders Keepers" would be an apt name for his collected works as well, and far more honest than what it's actually called--"Opened Ground." In addition to the influence of the perennially confused Swedes, I think Heaney's outsized success is largely due to his comforting conformity to easily recognizable tradition--critics, especially those of a conservative bent, eat this kind of stuff up. If you want to read a real innovator, also Irish, who really opens ground--and for that reason will never have "Winner of the Nobel Prize" trumpeted across her covers--check out Medbh McGuckian. ... Read more

Product Description
The new anthology is designed to present a great range of poetry in a fresh and accessible way. Allowing no more than one poem, or passage of poetry, to any poet, the editors have chosen not only work from the established canon of poetry in the English language, but examples, too, from the different languages of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, arranging them by subject matter rather than chronology. The results show the same confidence of taste, breadth of interest and sheer passion that made their previous collaboration so successful. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Glorious
This collection, covering an astonishingly wide range of work from many different historical periods, should be in every library.With as many magical discoveries as old favorites.Not to be missed.

(And be sure to find The Rattle Bag as well). ... Read more

Product Description
A rich body of mythology and literature has grown around the Celtic ritual known as the Feis of Tara ormarriage of sovereigntyancient ceremonies in which the future king pledges to care for the land and serve the goddess of sovereignty. Seamus Heaney has engaged this symbolic tradition in some of his most significant and controversial work. An impeccably researched and immensely readable work, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope reveals that Heaney s poetry offers a reverence for archetypal femininity and Dionysian energy that can counter the sterility and violence of postcolonial Irish life. In the tradition of poets who preceded him, Heaney turns to the marriage of sovereignty to encode a message for our times and to offer up emblems of hope on behalf of us all. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

I'm finally understanding...
For years I have been watching Seamus Heaney in interviews and wondered to myself, where does all this come from? Not a poet myself, I just intuitively felt there was much more to learn from him than I was grasping. Reading this book opened entirely new avenues of understanding for me, and Ms. Moloney obviously cares deeply for the man's work. Highly recommended!!

Hope
I have never read a book of literary criticism cover to cover before, but I found Moloney's book very readable and compelling, even.I had an interest in Ireland's history and in its relationship with England before I began, and I have always enjoyed Arthurian legend.This book correlated with much of what I knew already, filled in gaps I didn't know were there, opened up new ideas, and has sparked my desire to go further in my studies in this area. I am also a new fan of Seamus Heaney's work.I look forward to other publications by Moloney. I loved the discussion on Patricia Coughlan's ideas and wonder if there will be any response from the feminist camp.

Praying at the Water's Edge
Significant works of scholarship have a value that goes beyond research.This is such a book.Professor Moloney's thorough study of Heaney's place among Irish poets and within the Irish mythic tradition actually casts a wider net that includes all of us, embedded as we are in our conflicted sexes and societies, Irish or not.As Ms. Moloney, meticulously shows, Heaney and most other significant Irish poets have been struggling for centuries to come resolve or come to terms with a deep disconnect in the Irish past, as symbolized by the "Feis of Tara," a myth in various forms in which a hag-like mother-fertility figure must be accepted and embraced (sexually) in order to be transformed into a beautiful emblem of hope and fertility that renews a wasted land (country, Ireland).Professor Moloney's work suggests--by extention--that all of us, not just the Irish poets and people--suffer from some kind of similar disconnect and contradition, particularly in our sexual identities, and--by a further extention--in our respective political and historical contexts, regardless of what country we reside in.In short, we too are cut off--from our past, from ourselves, and from members of the opposite sex especially.We all need a reconciliation that will only come if we "effectively conquer" our "fear of the feminine," and achieve "the humility vitally required in our interaction with each other."Heaney's work, and the work of other Irish poets, is central to this imperative, healing objective--which must be achieved if the whole world is not to degenerate into something like the Irish "troubles" (i.e. Civil War) that forms the context within which Heaney is working, particularly.The solution is embodied in Heaney's quest to understand, accept, and then transcend the cultural mythology he inherited as an Ulster poet, conflicted from birth by Ireland's particular and violent disconnect.According to Moloney, Heaney "is linked utterly to his Irish past even as he argues memorably for a world beyond the post-colonial" (and post-patriarchal, if truth be told).Simply put, "it is kindness, after all" that "transforms" us, that frees us from the curses inherent in our cultural inheritances.As another Irish poet, John Montague, puts it, we need to move "beyond male condescension" and "feminist reaction," to "love's equal realm."This is why Moloney's book should be read--in addition to the fact that it also provides and introduction and insight into the work of several other significant Irish poets in addition to Heaney.It is a "hopeful" book in more ways than one.

Says Something New and Different
This is the fourth book of literary criticism on Seamus Heaney I've read so far. Moloney manages to say something new about Heaney's mythologem and places it within its context of Irish literature. I would recommend Moloney's work over the others I've read so far. ... Read more

Product Description
A poignant series of poems by one of the finest sixteenth-century Polish poets expresses the personal grief of the poet over the death of his young daughter and his growing sense of religious doubt. Reprint. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Silently Powerful
Without knowing some of the history of this work, "Laments" may seem merely a touching remembrance of the poet's daughter, whom he lost when she was only 3 years old. However, the poetic style that Kochanowski employs was reserved for those of fame and fortune, and it was considered socially unacceptable to write such a thing for a young child. Ironically, the poems still exist to this day for us to enjoy and Seamus Heaney, known for his own poetry and the recent translation of Beowulf, has rendered Kochanowski's verses in stark, simple language that conveys the rhythm, rhyme, and gravity of the poet's profound grief.

Now, Seamus Heaney's translations have always created mixed feelings in me. On one hand, Heaney is excellent at making poems seem human and not like transcendent works of words that must be studied and analyzed to be followed. On the other hand, Heaney puts much of himself into his translations and adds a presence of Irish colloquialism into the work (particularly in Beowulf). In this work, along with the aid of Stanislaw Baranczak, Heaney perfects the style that I've always known him to be capable of. The bilingual aspect will also make this edition indispensable to scholars and those attempting to learn the Polish language (and, hell, even those who can read both languages and want to compared the two(,

All in all, a vital piece of Renaissance poetry.

Beautiful, but far too smooth...
This translation is perhaps as good as they get -- it reads well, rythm and cadence are flawless. And yet, a comparison of two versions side by side serves as a useful reminder that even the best translation is merely an approximation of the original. It is also evident that sometimes very substantial compromises in content are needed to preserve the structural integrity of the poetic form.

The English text, as beautiful and touching as it is in its own right, unfortunately does not reflect the very noticeably rougher texture of the Polish original. Polish text, still mostly comprehensible to the educated Polish reader, sounds distinctly archaic, and "resists" contemporary reader's temptation to read fast, as if it deliberately tried to slow him/her down.

Alas, gone as well are many poetic devices of the original, such as clever metaphors and word plays. E.g., in the fragment of Lament 2, reproduced on the amazon website, lost is the original's play on the word "piórko" (feather) which can be both a child's toy, and a poet's quill in "Jeslim kiedy nad dziecmi piorko mial zabawic"; similarly, the contrast of the SOUND of the poet's lament and the empty SILENCE of death ("plakac nad gluchym grobem", literally "to WEEP on a SILENT grave") is awkwardly lost in an admittedly smooth sounding, and more emotional "to weep on a small daughter's grave".

The fairly unfortunate "maritime" metaphor ("Looms like cliff above some wild and rough / Shore") is perhaps more in line with the Irish or English poetic tradition, but is totally out of place in Kochanowski's poem, and it unwisely replaces a wonderfully archaic, yet entirely comprehensible, and often quoted "moja nienagrodna szkoda" (literally, and in awkwardly too many words, "my loss, which no prize shall repay").

Still, given the original's complexity, the task both translators decided to tackle must have been daunting indeed, and the result is stunningly beautiful. Despite some lost or awkward metaphors, the essential core of the work, which is its profound emotional charge, comes across as strong as in the original, and so the 5-star rating is entirely deserved.

Additionally, both poets-translators probably deserve a 6th, honorary star, for taking on an important task, several centuries overdue.

The Messenger
I discovered this collection in a Slavic Literature class where it was required.I was deeply touched by these words of a father in mourning for his daughter; feelings expressed in the 16th Century that translate as ifthey were written today.Last week I was discussing Polish literature witha Holocaust survivor.When I mentioned Kochanowski's "Treny"(Laments), she got tears in her eyes and gasped- how did I knowKochanowski?She quoted a phrase in Polish, then said she always thinksabout "Treny" when she thinks of her mother- it was her favorite-who was killed in Auschwitz.Today, when I gave her my bilingual copy, sheheld it to her heart.I could hear her heart crying when she said"thank you."Words of a daughter in mourning - and a humanconnection spanning four centuries. ... Read more