Seamus Heaney - City Arts & Lectures: On Art & Politics 2006 May 15, 2006

Monday, May 15

Born on his family?s farm, Mossbawn, thirty miles from Belfast, Ireland, Seamus Heaney has said County Derry is the ?country of the mind? where much of his poetry is grounded. Gaelic cultural and political heritage is the crux of Heaney?s poetry, though celebration of life and knowledge permeate all his writing. Whether honoring childbirth, the classics, or ?the everything flows and steady go of the world,? Heaney?s evocative language and masterful rhythms are lively, modern, and captivating. His poetry has been collected into several award-winning and beloved volumes including North, Opened Ground, The Spirit Level, and Electric Light. The rolling timbre of his distinctive voice fills the pages of his poetry, prose, and popular translation of the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney?s prose includes Preoccupations, a collection of essays called Finders Keepers, and The Redress of Poetry, a collection of his lectures at Oxford University. In 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most recent collection of poetry, District and Circle, will be published on the 40th anniversary of his first collection, Death of a Naturalist. A resident of Dublin since 1976, Heaney teaches annually at Harvard University.