A new book of Seamus Heaney’s work “represents the full arc of his writing life in one place,” a Heaney expert has said.
A major new volume of the late writer’s work brings together his published and previously unseen poems for the first time.
For Stephen Connolly, from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University in Belfast, this edition is the “first place where everything is all together”.
The Poems of Seamus Heaney includes all 12 of the late poet’s collections, alongside a selection of “uncollected” poems that originally appeared in newspapers, journals and magazines under different pen names.
The edition also includes 25 previously unpublished poems collected and selected by the Heaney family and made public.
Many of the unpublished poems are housed in the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in Dublin, where the poet bequeathed his works before his death in 2013.
The new, never before seen material, published by Faber, includes both “uncollected” and “unpublished” poems.
Stephen said that among the uncollected poems are some of the “first he ever published using his own name in the Belfast Telegraph, called Turkeys Observed, which wouldn’t have appeared in any earlier editions”.
While living in Belfast during the early 1950s, Stephen said Heaney published some poems under the penname Incertus – which is the Latin word for uncertain – which were published in student magazines.
Nobel laureate, Heaney, who was from Bellaghy in County Londonderry died in August 2013 at the age of 74.
He has long been internationally recognised as the greatest Irish poet since WB Yeats.
Heaney’s first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), contained rich depictions of his rural upbringing.
By the 1970s, as the Troubles worsened, his work took a more political turn.
Fascinated by folklore, he also published an award-winning translation of Beowulf.
Heaney has held Professorships at Harvard, and was Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Heaney was proud Irishman and famously protested against his inclusion in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry with the lines, “Be advised, my passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen.”