Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work considers the ways that memory functions in Heaney’s poetry. Joanne Piavanini argues that the shaping of collective memory is one of Heaney’s major contributions as a poet. Locating Heaney in a transnational literary sphere, this book argues that his late work isdefined by a type of cosmopolitanism openness: the work moves beyond national identity to explore multiple allegiances and identifications. Moreover, Piavanini demonstrates that memory is a helpful lens to look at Heaney’s late work, in particular, because of the interplay of past, present and future in these works: in the construction of a collective memory of the Troubles; in the use of the elegy to commemorate the passing of important contemporary poets; in his writing on events with transnational significance, such as 9/11; in the slippages between past and present in poems about his family; and through the literary afterlives of texts—specifically, his appropriation of canonical classical texts. Drawing on approaches and concepts from memory studies, Piavanini considers Heaney’s late work to develop an analysis of poetry as a vehicle of memory.

Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking examines Seamus Heaney’s poetic engagement with myth from his earliest work to the posthumous publication of Aeneid Book VI. The essays explore the ways in which Heaney creates his own mythic outlook through multiple mythic lenses. They reveal how Heaney adopts a demiurgic role throughout his career, creating a poetic universe that draws on diverse mythic cycles from Greco-Roman to Irish and Norse to Native American. In doing so, this collection is in dialogue with recent work on Heaney’s engagement with myth. However, it is unique in its wide-ranging perspective, extending beyond Ancient and Classical influences. In its focus on Heaney’s personal metamorphosis of several mythic cycles, this collection reveals more fully the poet’s unique approach to mythmaking, from his engagement with the act of translation to transnational influences on his work and from his poetic transformations to the poetry’s boundary-crossing transitions. Combining the work of established Heaney scholars with the perspectives of early-career researchers, this collection contains a wealth of original scholarship that reveals Heaney’s expansive mythic mind. Mythmaking, an act for which Heaney has faced severe criticism, is reconsidered by all contributors, prompting multifaceted and nuanced readings of the poet’s work.

The Art of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry is a critical study of the poet's later work. While exploring his practice as a translator, it also traces his increasing preoccupation with the possibilities and conditions of translation in the theological sense of being lifted up in spirit. To the work of this philosophical poet, who would be both “earthed and heady” this book brings the insights of ordinary language philosophy as practiced by Stanley Cavell. It devotes separate chapters to Station Island and three later collections: Seeing Things, Electric Light and Human Chain. The first of these addresses the most fundamental change in Heaney’s life when he acknowledges the “need and chance to re-envisage” his Irish-Catholic upbringing; it is also replete with both the activity and the trope of translation. Published seven years later, Seeing Things begins with a translation of Virgil’s golden bough episode and ends with a similar crossing over into the underworld by Dante. Heaney transforms both into poems about poetry. In Electric Light, Heaney returns to Virgil, but now he concentrates not on the hero of the Aeneid but on Virgil's earlier efforts in pastoral, a mode of writing that Heaney takes as a model for his own time and place of “devastated order.” Heaney returns to the Aeneid in Human Chain, but this time around he gives all his attention to the scene of the human souls in Elysium seeking rebirth and turns it into an image for the need and chance of pronouncing “a final Yes” to our world and our place in it.

Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry looks at the ghosts and spectres present within the poetry of the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Covering Heaney’s work from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, to his final collection, Human Chain, this volume analyses Heaney’s poetry through the lens of hauntology as presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. This book presents spectres and ghosts not in the conventional sense, as purely supernatural, physical manifestations haunting a place, but instead as having a non-physical presence. In this sense past cultures, societies, texts, poets, and memories are examined as having a spectral influence on Heaney’s writing. His work is indebted to hauntedness as the past in all its forms sutures itself within the present of his thinking and writing, and our reading of the poetry. Topics for discussion include the Norse spectres in the early poetry; British colonialism and its haunting influence on the poet; a renewed look at the bog poems as being influenced by the spectral; the classical influence of Virgil and Dante; and a reading of ‘Route 110’ that incorporates the major instances of Heaney’s career into a singular poem. The book also incorporates Heaney’s prose work and interviews into the discussion and uses these works as a metacommentary to the poetry offering a deeper insight into the mind of one of Ireland’s greatest writers.

This book provides an introduction to the concept of cultural memory, offering a comprehensive overview of its history, forms and functions.

Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field Work he "brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world" (Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present—the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 101" plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.