1st Edition
The Frontier of Writing A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose
The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose is the first collection of essays solely focused on examining the Nobel prize winning poet’s prose. The collection offers ten different perspectives on this body of work which vary from sustained thematic analyses on poetic form, the construction of identity, and poetry as redress, to a series of close readings of prose writing on poetic exemplars such as Robert Lowell, Patrick Kavanagh, W.B Yeats, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Brian Friel. Seamus Heaney’s prose is extensive in its literary depth, knowledge, critical awareness and its span. During the course of his life, he published six collections of prose entitled Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings, The Place of Writing, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures and Finders Keepers. Each of these texts is addressed in the collection alongside occasional and specific essays such as ‘Crediting Poetry’, ‘Writer and Righter’ and ‘Mossbawn via Mantua: Ireland in/and Europe, Cross-currents and Exchanges’, among many others. This book is a comprehensive and timely study of Seamus Heaney’s prose from leading international scholars in the field.
Introduction: Coming to Poetic Terms with Himself and Others
Eugene O’Brien and Ian Hickey
Chapter 1: ‘Things Founded Clean on Their Own Shapes’: Seamus Heaney and the Shape of Poetry
Eugene O’Brien
Chapter 2: Seamus Heaney’s Uncanny Encounters
Henry Hart
Chapter 3: Double Agent: The Redress of Seamus Heaney’s Prose Poems
William Fogarty
Chapter 4: Preoccupied with Redress: Heaney Meditates on Getting his ‘Feel into Words’
Ruth Macklin
Chapter 5: ‘The Makings of a Music’: Musicality and Seamus Heaney’s Prose
Ian Hickey
Chapter 6: The Limits of Redress: Heaney’s Aesthetics of Grace Confronts Larkin’s Struggle with Gravity
Magdalena Kay
Chapter 7: Different Animals: Heaney’s Public and Poetic Ted Hughes
Caoimhe Higgins
Chapter 8: ‘Moving in Step’: Seamus Heaney on Patrick Kavanagh
Gary Wade
Chapter 9: ‘The Push of the Whole Man’: Heaney on Robert Lowell
Meg Tyler
Chapter 10: Seamus Heaney’s Wordsworthian Prose Assessments of Brian Friel’s Drama
Richard Rankin Russell
Biography
Ian Hickey has worked as a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College. His first monograph Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry was published by Routledge in 2021 and was a joint winner of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize. He also co-edited, alongside Ellen Howley, Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking published by Routledge in 2023. He has published numerous journal articles on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Brendan Behan and 21st century Irish writing, as well as on Benjamin Zephaniah in Spoken Word in the UK. He is currently writing his second monograph entitled Fragmentation: Twenty-First Century Irish Poetry and Fiction.
Eugene O’Brien is a professor of English Literature and Theory and head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College. He is also the director of the Mary Immaculate Institute for Irish Studies. He is the editor of the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory (Oxford Online Bibliographies: Literary and Cultural Theory) and of the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature). He has published a number of books on Seamus Heaney including: Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker: A Study of the Prose (Syracuse University Press); The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University of Notre Dame Press); Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind, Studies on Contemporary Ireland Series (Liffey Press); Seamus Heaney Searches for Answers (Pluto Press) and Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (University Press of Florida). His latest book is Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (Routledge 2023); and he is working on a monograph of Micheal O’Siadhail (Routledge) and A Companion to 21st Century Irish Writing (with Anne Fogarty) (Routledge).
