Electric Light: Poems

seamus heaney

The powerful collection by the bestselling translator of Beowulf

In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air
That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold
In the everything flows and steady go of the world.
--from "Perch"

Seamus Heaney's collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world and revisiting the poet's rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least, the origins of words) and the places where things start from, the ground of understanding -- whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.

Electric Light ranges from short takes to conversation poems. The pre-Socratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the elegizing of friends and fellow poets. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign things their proper names; once again Heaney can be heard exting his word hoard and roll call in this, his eleventh collection.

Genres poetryirish literatureirelandliteraturenonfiction21st centuryschool

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 3,2002

Literary awards

t.s. eliot prize for poetry,

This edition

Format: 112 pages, Paperback
Published: April 3, 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374528416
ASIN: 0374528411
Language: English

About the author

seamus heaney

Works of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections Wintering Out (1972) and Field Work (1979) as well as a translation of Beowulf (1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney on Wikipedia.