- Paperback: 80 pages
- Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1 edition (Mar 31 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374531390
- ISBN-13: 978-0374531393
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 14 x 0.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 23 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #633,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding “an early warning system to get back inside my own head,” Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field Work he “brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world” (Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).
About the Author
Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stays with you long after...,
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The End of Art is Peace,
By dylanissimus "dylanissimus" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews This was the third book of poetry that this reviewer purchased as a youth, the first two being Eliot's Four Quartets and Rimbaud's Illuminations. This book remains a favourite of ours, fifteen years after its purchase. The Glanmore Sonnets occupy a central position in this slender but rich volume, as is fitting; it is perhaps Heaney's masterwork. The Elegy to Robert Lowell, the "welder of English" who composed "heart-hammering blank sonnets of love for Harriet and Lizzie" is also noteworthy. There is much about the sectarian warfare of the troubled six counties of Northern Ireland, but like Dante (who appears via epigraph and translation in this book) Heane!y can transfigure the sins of his land into glorious language that is an exemplar of poetry's redemptive potentiality. "I think our very form is bound to change ... Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice." There is much here about love, nuptial, natural, sexual. At the end of "The Guttural Muse," there is a couplet of exclusion from the joyful earthiness that the poet observes: "I felt like some old pike all badged with sores / Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life." There is warfare and loss, violence and bliss, the joys of the flesh and the crucifixion of a country. But after reading the poems in FIELD WORK, the reader will doubtless share in Seamus Heaney's faith that "the end of art is peace."
5.0 out of 5 stars
Digging,
With "Field Work" the metaphor of "digging" with which Seamus Heaney began his first volume of poetry ("Death of a Naturalist") has become a succinct and overarching symbol of his entire literary endeavour. In that poem "digging" comes to connote the agricultural roots of his childhood (and of the Irish people) but also the search for word-fodder that his poetry enacts. "Field Work" continues to explore these concerns in a powerful collection of poems. Here the deeply personal ("Glanmore Sonnets"), primarly poetic ("Elegy") and cautiously political ("Triptych", "The Toome Road") sit comfortably alongside one another. While Heaney (as the most famous voice in contemporary Irish literature) has been repeatedly criticised for his silence on the Ulster situation, this volume shows that (as in "North") he is able to deal with its complex issues without taking sides. Always his concern is for the impartial victim (the position he himself assumes, that of the "unmolested orchid" ["Triptych 1"]) and the place he or she occupies among the combatants. "Casualty" describes a friendly but laconic pub drinker (apolitical and an acquaintance of Heaney's) who was killed by the British for defying curfew. "Triptych 1" includes the description of "Two young men with rifles on the hill" - we do not know if they are Unionists or I.R.A., they are two sides of the same coin. Heaney's continual "digging" allows him to move beneath the emotive surface of events and to unearth their common history, culture, landscape, experience. In "Field Work" the very poetry with which Heaney draws these moments is itself a tool to pare bloody and partisan politics back to its single seed, the common root of the Irish field and furrow.
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