Electric Light

Description

Seamus Heaney's new collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry. Electric Light ranges from short takes 'glosses' to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to the must and drift of talk. The pre-Socratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming the real names of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign to things their proper names; once again, Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and rollcall in this, his eleventh collection.

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. After a year as a post-graduate at a college of education, and a year teaching in a secondary modern school in Ballymurphy, he was appointed to the staff of St Joseph's College of Education. In 1966 Seamus Heaney took up a lecturing post in the English Department of Queen's University, and remained there until 1972, spending the academic year 1970-71 as a visiting Professor at the University of California in Berkeley.

"Arguably the finest poet now writing in English." -James Shapiro, "The New York Times Book Review"