 First edition | |
| Author | Seamus Heaney |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
Publication date | 1972 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 80 |
| ISBN | 978-0-571-10158-0 |
| Preceded by | Door into the Dark |
| Followed by | North |
What do I say if they wheel out their dead?
from "Stump",
Wintering Out (1972)
Wintering Out (1972) is a poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The volume contains poems written between 1969 and 1971. [1] Heaney wrote much of the collection while he was on sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. [1] Heaney has said that his time in California had a liberating effect on the form of his poetry: "In the poems of Wintering Out, in the little quatrain shapes, there are signs of that loosening, the California spirit, a more relaxed movement to the verse." [2] Heaney writes explicitly about California in the poem "Westering."
While the poems in Wintering Out are more formally open, they also demonstrate Heaney's intensifying commitment to rooting his poetry in the Irish landscape. Throughout the collection, Heaney uses linguistic cues and place names to develop a sense of community and forge a connection with the Irish past. [2] Poems like "Toome," "Broagh," and "Anahorish" are rich with allusions to Irish language and topography, while "Shore Woman" and "Maighdean Mara" draw on Irish folklore and proverbs. [3] Heaney explained the importance of the Irish landscape in Wintering Out during an interview with literary critic Seamus Deane. [4] Deane asked Heaney if he intended to create a "cultural landscape" with his poetry, and if Heaney insists "that this landscape be distinctly of this culture." Heaney responded: "Yes I think I came to this notion in the writing of the Wintering Out collection, particularly in the place name poems: 'Anahorish', 'Broagh', and so on. I had a great sense of release as they were being written, a joy and devil-may-careness, and that convinced me that one could be faithful to the nature of the English language ... and, at the same time, be faithful to one's own non-English origin ..." [5] This quote shows that a sense of "place" was very important to Heaney in the formation of Wintering Out. As Heaney said, the place name poems were his mode for rooting the collection in Ireland, acknowledging his own origins, even while doing so in the English language.
Wintering Out also contains one of Heaney's most important bog poems. In "Tollund Man," Heaney builds upon the image of the bog that he introduces in Door into the Dark's "Bogland." Heaney was deeply moved by P.V. Glob's study of the mummified Iron Age bodies found in Jutland's peat bogs. Bogs were a familiar feature of the Northern Irish landscape and Heaney found contemporary political relevance in the relics of the ritualistic killings. [2]
In Wintering Out, Heaney grapples with the place of politics in his poetry. [6] In the late 1960s and early 1970s the sectarian violence of the Troubles was on the rise. Heaney felt pressure to act as a spokesperson for the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland. [2] He moved from Belfast to County Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland shortly after the publication of Wintering Out. [2] In North , Heaney's next and most controversial volume, he returns to the bog bodies with more explicitly political poems. [7]
Some critics, such as Eavan Boland of the Irish Times, applauded Heaney for his engagement with "mature" political themes. [8] However, others expressed disappointment that Heaney did not do more to address the Troubles head on. [9] The tension around how the poet wrote about the Troubles would continue to be of interest in the critical reception of following volumes like North published in 1975, and are the subject of several interviews with the poet himself such as Heaney's 1977 interview with Seamus Dean "Unhappy and at Home". [10]
Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems .
The Tollund Man is a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 5th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950, preserved as a bog body, near Silkeborg on the Jutland peninsula in Denmark. The man's physical features were so well preserved that he was mistaken for a recent murder victim. Twelve years before his discovery, another bog body, Elling Woman, was found in the same bog.
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
The Field Day Theatre Company began as an artistic collaboration between playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. In 1980, the duo set out to launch a production of Friel's recently completed play, Translations. They decided to rehearse and premiere the play in Derry with the hope of establishing a major theatre company for Northern Ireland. The production and performance of Translations generated a level of excitement and anticipation that unified, if only for a short time, the various factions of a divided community.
Richard Kerr Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet.
Nicholas Laird is a Northern Irish novelist and poet.
Seamus Francis Deane was an Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian. He was noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which won several literary awards and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.
Death of a Naturalist (1966) is a collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. The collection was Heaney's first major published volume, and includes ideas that he had presented at meetings of The Belfast Group. Death of a Naturalist won the Cholmondeley Award, the Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
District and Circle is a poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was published in 2006 and won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. The collection also won the Irish Times "Poetry Now Award".
North (1975) is a collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first of his works that directly dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it looks frequently to the past for images and symbols relevant to the violence and political unrest of that time. Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.
Station Island is the sixth collection of original poetry written by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. It is dedicated to the Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel. The collection was first published in the UK and Ireland in 1984 by Faber & Faber and was then published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1985. Seamus Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.
Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish is a version of the Irish poem Buile Shuibhne written by Seamus Heaney, based on an earlier translation by J.G. O'Keeffe. The work was first published in 1983 and won the 1985 PEN Translation Prize for verse, the first year the prize was awarded as such. Photographer Rachel Giese later took revised portions of the poem to accompany a collection of her photos titled Sweeney's Flight.
Field Work (1979) is the fifth poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Spirit Level is a 1996 poetry collection written by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It won the poetry prize for the 1996 Whitbread Awards.
Dennis O'Driscoll was an Irish poet, essayist, critic and editor. Regarded as one of the best European poets of his time, Eileen Battersby considered him "the lyric equivalent of William Trevor" and a better poet "by far" than Raymond Carver. Gerard Smyth regarded him as "one of poetry's true champions and certainly its most prodigious archivist". His book on Seamus Heaney is regarded as the definitive biography of the Nobel laureate.
Collected Poems is a spoken-word recording of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney reading his own work. It was released by RTÉ to mark his 70th birthday, which occurred on 13 April 2009. The fifteen-CD boxed set spans 556 tracks in over twelve hours of oral performance by the poet. The entire work was also released on one disc in MP3 format.
Human Chain is the twelfth and final poetry collection by Seamus Heaney.It was first published in 2010 by the Faber and Faber.
That part of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland was created in 1922, with the partition of the island of Ireland. The majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted to remain within the United Kingdom. Most of these were the Protestant descendants of colonists from Great Britain.
The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved is an archaeological study of the bog bodies of Northern Europe written by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob. First published in 1965 by Gyldendal under the Danish title of Mosefolket: Jernalderens Mennesker bevaret i 2000 År, it was translated into English by the English archaeologist Rupert Bruce-Mitford and published by Faber and Faber in 1969. In 1966 it was translated into German by Thyra Dohrenburg and published by Winkler Verlag Munich under the title Die Schläfer im Moor.
"Punishment" is a poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney first published in his 1975 collection North. It, along with "Bog Queen", "The Grauballe Man", "Strange Fruit" and "The Tollund Man", is inspired by P.V. Glob's book, The Bog People."Punishment" highlights similarities between Europe's ancient past and The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He is the fourth Irish Nobel laureate after the playwright Samuel Beckett in 1969.