Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 [1] makes it possible to form something like a comprehensive picture of the Irish poet’s work. Slowly but unmistakably over the past thirty ...

It’s ordinarily only the famous who first approach a nonfiction book by thumbing through the index, looking for their own name. Unfamous, I nevertheless found myself doing just that this past summer ...

This article is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media. There will soon be a huge volume of collected Poems of Seamus Heaney (1,100 ...

Even the previously uncollected work in “The Poems of Seamus Heaney” shows a master craftsman in full control of his powers. Seamus Heaney’s ambition as an artist was balanced by a cool sense of ...

When people asked the poet Seamus Heaney what it was like to be living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the start of the Troubles, he tended to downplay the violence: “Things aren’t too bad in our ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...

When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, who lived across the street, was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, ...