Seamus Heaneys Regions

Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish Troubles beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and mapthe spirit region, that world beyond our ken.

In Seamus Heaneys Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that Heaneys regionsthe first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this oneoffer the best entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaneys body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. As Russell shows, Heaney believed in the power of ideasand the texts representing themto begin resolving historical divisions. For Russell, Heaneys regionalist poetry contains a Hegelian synthesis view of history that imagines potential resolutions to the conflicts that have plagued Ireland and Northern Ireland for centuries. Drawing on extensive archival and primary material by the poet, Seamus Heaneys Regions examines Heaneys work from before his first published poetry volume, Death of a Naturalist in 1966, to his most recent volume, the elegiac Human Chain in 2010, to provide the most comprehensive treatment of the poets work to date.