Author Description

Late Heaney Follows The Poet Through The Landscapes, Communities And Artists That He Wrote About In His Last Four Collections, The Spirit Level, Electric Light, District And Circle, And Human Chain, Which It Sets In Conversation With Heaney's Work At Large. It Is Set In The Landscapes Of His Work And Begins With A Foreword To Situate Heaney As A Writer And To Introduce Myself As A Reader. There Follows A Chapter On Heaney's Travels From Greece, Where He Learned He Had Been Awarded The Nobel, To Stockholm, Where He Accepted It. This Gives Some Sense Of What This Time Meant For Him, And For His Writing, And Is An Opportunity To Share In His Sense Of Self-reflection As He Looked Back Over His Career And His Life. I Take The Moment Of The Nobel To Be The Beginning Of The Late Phase Because It Is A Clear Point Of Transition In His Writing And In His Life. There Follow Three Chapters On The Places, People And Memories That Shape Heaney's Work In This Final Period. Of These, Landscapes Describes The Places That Heaney Draws And Returns To In His Poems; Bearings Describes The Other Writers And Artists That Heaney Relates To In The Work; And Ghosts Marks The Mournfulness Of The Late Poetry As The Poet Begins To Imagine Himself Among The Shades Of So Many Friends. The Book Closes With A Consideration Of Heaney's Late Work From The Perspective Of The Riverbank, A Place That Features Powerfully In His Final Poems, Resonant As It Is With Images Of Death. For All That, This Is, Surprisingly, A Book Of The Light More Than Dark, Heaney's Poems Dedicated To The Practice Of Illumination-- Provided By Publisher.