Seamus Heaney - Griffin Poetry Prize

Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year award, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. District and Circle, his eleventh collection of poems, was published in 2006 and was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize.

The Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry presented its Lifetime Recognition Award to Seamus Heaney on June 6, 2012.

Seamus Heaney died on August 30, 2013. We offered our tribute and collected selections from the heartfelt words of many others here.

Human Chain 2011 Shortlist

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA

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Judges’ Citation

The poems in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain contain tones and phrases that are perfectly tuned; they are true to memory and loss, and somehow miraculously they also manage to offer a vision of what is above or beyond the mere facts.

The poems in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain contain tones and phrases that are perfectly tuned; they are true to memory and loss, and somehow miraculously they also manage to offer a vision of what is above or beyond the mere facts. The feeling is elegiac but also loosened and buoyant. Memory in these poems is filled with tones of regret and undertones of anguish, but it can also appear in cadences of hard-won wonder. There is an active urge in the rhythms of these poems to capture the living breath of things; sometimes the breath is hushed, and other times wise and resigned in its way of holding rhythms in and then releasing them. In the most ambitious poem, Heaney wanders in the shadow of Virgil’s Aeneid, making his own journey in memory across Northern Ireland, allowing images and recollections in all their sonorous beauty to hit sharply against the sense of a time that has past, and can be recovered now in ways which are controlled but insistent in these poems.

Selected poems
by Seamus Heaney

viii

As one when the month is young sees a new moon

Fading into daytime, again it is her face

At the dormer window, her hurt still new.

My look behind me hurried as I unlock,

Switch on, rev up, pull out and drive away

In the car she’ll not have taken her eyes off,

The brakelights flicker-flushing at the corner

Like red lamps swung by RUC patrols

In the small hours on pre-Troubles roads

After dances, after our holdings on

And holdings back, the necking

And nay-saying age of impurity.

from Route 110

Seamus Heaney

about this poem

for Terence Brown

Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again

With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave –

The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed

That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.

Human Chain

Seamus Heaney

about this poem

Human Chain 2011 Shortlist

Judges’ Citation

Selected poemsby Seamus Heaney

Selected poems
by Seamus Heaney