Seamus Heaney

This short critical guide to Heaney’s poetry, the first to be published about him, appeared as part of the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series edited by Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby. Exploring the future Nobel Prizewinner’s reputation as ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’, the book provides a brief biography of Heaney, uncovers the sources of his poems, examines his fascination with place-names and ‘word-hoards’, and explains his poetry’s complex relationship to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.