Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney is the third posthumous volume of work by the Irish Nobel laureate, following substantial selected collections of his letters and translations. Gathering together all his individual poetry books plus a capacious selection of uncollected poems, including 28 that have never been previously published, along with more than 400 pages of notes, this aspires to be scholarly and definitive. From his first book, Heaney not only secured the admiration of his readers; he also earned their trust. Writing in diction colloquial and transcendent, Heaney has written about weights and measures, scales and balancing. “Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.” This first couplet of the third section of “Terminus,” the title suggestive of the end of the line and of life, plainly states a fact about bearing up—sometimes it is easier to take on more, to become a fulcrum, to be—to use a word he uses so well—“vouchsafed” by a burden, by vocation. One can only be grateful that Heaney held up and held on as long as he did.