Seamus Heaney’s Regions
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- $43.99
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- $43.99
Publisher Description
Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish “Troubles” beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and map—the spirit region, that world beyond our ken.
In Seamus Heaney’s Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that Heaney’s regions—the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one—offer the best entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaney’s body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. As Russell shows, Heaney believed in the power of ideas—and the texts representing them—to begin resolving historical divisions. For Russell, Heaney’s regionalist poetry contains a “Hegelian synthesis” view of history that imagines potential resolutions to the conflicts that have plagued Ireland and Northern Ireland for centuries. Drawing on extensive archival and primary material by the poet, Seamus Heaney’s Regions examines Heaney’s work from before his first published poetry volume, Death of a Naturalist in 1966, to his most recent volume, the elegiac Human Chain in 2010, to provide the most comprehensive treatment of the poet’s work to date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this study of Heaney's Northern Irish regionalism, Baylor University English professor Russell (Poetry and Peace) neatly traces the impact of the author's Ulster roots across his poetry, politics, culture, and spirituality. Russell delves into the political and cultural implications of a divided Ireland, noting that Heaney was an optimist always imagining "a new region of Northern Ireland," healed and undivided. In addition to insightful readings of the poems, Russell illuminates the role that Heaney's essays, book reviews, translations, and radio dramas played in shaping his public image. In one highlights of the book, Russell analyzes Heaney's use of the Dantean terza rima, which he employed partly to move past connotations with Northern Ireland and into "the region of eternity." Turning again to his translations and dramas, Russell explains how Heaney used the historical example in The Cure at Troy to suggest a miraculous solution to Northern Ireland's conflicts. After 1990, Heaney developed a subtle "second strand of regionalism" that focused on envisioning a new Northern Ireland and understanding the spirit world. A substantial and magisterial work of literary criticism, Russell's volume stands as a valuable companion to Heaney's writing.