ABSTRACT
ANDREWS has compiled a collection of essays, which covers all the poet’s verse up to, and including, Seeing Things. His play and two books of essays are used in a supplementary manner. The book’s objective is “to offer close analysis and assessment of Heaney’s work from a variety of standpoints, and to relate it to its social, political and artistic contexts”. Among the perspectives included are ones examining the place of ritual in Heaney’s verse, the manner in which the poetry addresses “the poetics of identity”, Heaney’s translations, and an adversarial evaluation of the poet, which finds that “his doors into the dark have not illuminated the Catholic Irish subconscious, and his doors into the light release a figure curiously masked and chained”. A number of the other essays, all of which are by noted academic critics, see Heaney’s work in terms of growth and development, which students will find particularly useful.
