A trove of unpublished poems by the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney is set to be printed alongside his collected and uncollected poems, published together for the first time.
The Poems of Seamus Heaney will feature his 12 collections interspersed with poems published in magazines, journals and newspapers, plus 25 poems selected from Heaney’s large number of unpublished works.
The unearthed poems include chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar – published for the first time below – which Heaney wrote for the wedding of one of his sons, Christopher, in July 2004. Many of the unpublished poems are housed in the National Library of Ireland (NLI), where the poet bequeathed his literary papers before his death in 2013.
Whether or not thay should be published was an “absolutely core question”, saeid Matthew Hollis, a poet and a long-term editor of Heaney, who worked with the poet’s family and fellow editors Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue over the last decade to put together the collection, published by Faber this Thursday.”If an author chose not to publish a poem, does anyone else have the right to do so?”
Though, given that Heaney had passed the poems to the NLI, “we didn’t get a sense that he wished them to remain private”, said Hollis. Some of the poems they looked at had not reached a state of completion that “perhaps Seamus himself would have been satisfied” with,which is why he may have set them aside. the chosen unpublished poems are included in the appendix, so as to seperate them from the works published in Heaney’s lifetime. The book also features a commentary by the editors,which “situates” the poems.
seamus Heaney at home in Dublin Bay in November 1979.Photograph: Jane Bown
reading his 12 collections together, there is a “clear sense of moving between subjects and periods”, said Hollis. The first four have a “common project in the ground and in the bog metaphor”, which he used to write about Ireland’s history and the Troubles; there is then a “middle period” focused on domestic life and fatherhood; and finally a later period in which he “seems to face out and addresses worldly subjects”, including 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings.
Fitting into t