Beowulf

Description

'The whole performance is wonderfully intermediate - poised between the Bible and folk wisdom, between the Light Ages and the Dark Ages - and at the same time pulverisingly actual in its language. Heaney has caught the balance of these brilliantly; he has made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece.' Andrew Motion, Financial Times 'What characterises this Beowulf is its energetic, relentless driving forward.miraculous mix of the poem's original spirit and Heaney's voice.' Bernard O'Donoghue, Irish Times

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He grew up in the country, on a farm, in touch with a traditional rural way of life, which he wrote about in his first book Death of a Naturalist (1966). He attended the local school and in 1951 went as a boarder to St Columb's College, about 40 miles away in Derry (the poem 'Singing School' in North refers to this period of his life). In 1956 he went on a scholarship to Queen's University, Belfast and graduated with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1961. He has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. District and Circle is his twelfth collection of poems, and his first new collection for five years.