Tag: Nobel Laureate

Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

So here I am at the end of Seamus Heaney’s major collections. I came via the sideways path, the one that starts with his Nobel lecture, which is brilliant, and has repaid many re-readings. It took me through Finders Keepers a collection of his prose, and then through his Beowulf. I no longer remember just …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/09/human-chain-by-seamus-heaney/

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

Things, moments, people, poems. Heaney finds inspiration for the poems in District and Circle in things that he encounters or imagines, moments he hopes to preserve or evoke in others, people he remembers, and poems he either recalls or translates. Places, which loomed larger in other collections, are less present here, though of course they …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/29/district-and-circle-by-seamus-heaney/

Wrapping Up

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag

Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk. Nobel winner Tokarczuk uses very short chapters, each titled “The Time of …”, to depict life in an archetpyal Polish village from just before the outbreak of the First World War through the last years …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/30/wrapping-up-3/

Electric Light by Seamus Heaney

Electric Light by Seamus Heaney

At age 62, some 35 years after publishing his first book-length collection, six years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney might have settled into a particular style of poetry. In Electric Light, though, Heaney forges onward. The volume features at least three eclogues (a short, pastoral poem, often in dialogue; I had …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/11/electric-light-by-seamus-heaney/

The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney

The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney

Usually when I am reading one of Seamus Heaney’s collections, I use a slip of paper as a bookmark and note the poems that strike me as particularly interesting or effective, so that I can have them fresh in my mind when I write about them for Frumious, or as a guide when I return …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/04/the-spirit-level-by-seamus-heaney/

Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz

Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz has a captivating mind. In Native Realm he invites readers to join him on what his subtitle calls “A Search for Self-Definition,” and is a journey from the wooded interior of what is today Lithuania, where he was born into a family of Polish-speaking gentry, through his young adulthood in interwar Warsaw, past …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/26/native-realm-by-czeslaw-milosz/

On the Field of Glory by Henryk Sienkiewicz

On the Field of Glory by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Henryk Sienkiewicz, an early Nobel laureate, wrote historical novels set mostly in the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that, like Shakespeare’s history plays, have a resonance well beyond their initial audiences and historical settings. Sienkiewicz lived and wrote at a time when Poland’s imperial neighbors had erased it from the map of Europe, and yet …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/24/on-the-field-of-glory-by-henryk-sienkiewicz/

Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney

Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney

Seeing Things returns to a greater length, though many of its poems — particularly the 48 in Part II, “Squarings” — are short; the squarings are all twelve lines each. “Glanmore Revisited” offers seven sonnets in its short sequence. “The Schoolbag” is also sonnet length, while “1.1.1987” and “An August Night” are three lines each. Compact …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/22/seeing-things-by-seamus-heaney/

The Triumph of Achilles by Louise Glück

The Triumph of Achilles by Louise Glück

Only having read The Odyssey could be a bit of a hindrance in addressing a collection titled The Triumph of Achilles, especially when my notes show that that the title poem is one that struck me as I was reading through. Even without commanding the details of The Illiad, though, I liked the considerations Glück …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/25/the-triumph-of-achilles-by-louise-gluck/

Selected Poems 1966–1987 by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney Selected Poems

The receipt tucked away in the pages of this collection tells me that I bought it in early 1997, in Washington, DC. At that time, I would only have read Heaney’s Nobel lecture. His Beowulf, the first poetic work of his that I read, was still two years from publication. There’s another receipt in the …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/23/selected-poems-1966-1987-by-seamus-heaney/