The School Bag

Description

The new anthology is designed to present a great range of poetry in a fresh and accessible way. Allowing no more than one poem, or passage of poetry, to any poet, the editors have chosen not only work from the established canon of poetry in the English language, but examples, too, from the different languages of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, arranging them by subject matter rather than chronology. The results show the same confidence of taste, breadth of interest and sheer passion that made their previous collaboration so successful.

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.