Door into the Dark: Poems (Faber Paperbacks) [Paperback]

Seamus Heaney (Author)

Book Description

Series: Faber Paperbacks | Publication Date: January 1, 1972

Door into the Dark, Heaney's second collection of poems, first appeared in 1969. Already his widely celebrated gifts of precision, thoughtfulness, and musicality were everywhere apparent.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Heaney has the gift of finding a new and consummate phrase to evoke physical qualities, and when these take on symbolic resonance the result is superb. . . . [This] collection as a whole is a splendid achievement."--Richard Kell, The Guardian

About the Author

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland. He grew up in the country, on a farm, in touch with a traditional rural way of life, which he wrote about in his first book Death of a Naturalist (1966). He attended the local school and in 1951 went as a boarder to St Columb's College, about 40 miles away in Derry (the poem 'Singing School' in North refers to this period of his life). In 1956 he went on a scholarship to Queen's University, Belfast and graduated with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1961. After a year as a post-graduate at a college of education, and a year teaching in a secondary modern school in Ballymurphy, he was appointed to the staff of St Joseph's College of Education. In 1966 Seamus Heaney took up a lecturing post in the English Department of Queen's University, and remained there until 1972, spending the academic year 1970-71 as a visiting Professor at the University of California in Berkeley.

In 1972 Seamus Heaney stopped teaching in order to devote more time to his writing, and moved with his family to Glanmore in County Wicklow, and later to Dublin. For three years he made his living as a freelance writer, presenting a radio programme for RTE and doing occasional work for the BBC and for various journals. During this period he produced the poems collected in North (1975). In September 1975 he resumed his teaching, this time at Carysfort College in Dublin.

Seamus Heaney began to write in 1962, publishing first in Irish magazines. During the early and mid-sixties, he was connected with a group of writers in Belfast that included Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and James Simmons. Philip Hobsbaum ran a poetry group during these years and the poets met regularly at his house until he moved to Glasgow in 1966. After this, the meetings continued under Heaney's chairmanship until 1970, and in this later period were attended by younger poets such as Paul Muldoon, Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley. In 1968, with Michael Longley and the singer David Hammond, Seamus Heaney took part in a two-week reading tour of Northern Ireland called 'Room to Rhyme', the first in a series of such literary enterprises sponsored by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974 and served until 1979. He is a member of Aosdana.

Seamus Heaney has won numerous awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (1968), the Denis Devlin Award (1973), the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize (1975), the American Irish Foundation Literary Award (1973) and the WHSmith Annual Award (1976). In 1987 he was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Award for The Haw Lantern.

In 1965 he married Marie Devlin and they have three children. He is currently the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet-in-Residence at Harvard University where he goes to teach for 6 weeks every two years. From 1989 to 1994 Seamus Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. A collection of his Oxford Poetry Lectures entitled The Redress of Poetry was published by Faber and Faber in September 1995. November 1995 saw the publication of his co-translation of Laments, a moving Polish Classic of the sixteenth century by Jan Kochanowski. The Spirit Level, his first new collection of poems for five years, was published in May 1996. In 1997 The School Bag was published, a companion volume to The Rattle Bag, co-edited with Ted Hughes. 1999 saw the publication of his translation of Beowulf, which went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. His most recent collection of poetry, Electric Light, was published by Faber in April 2001. In 2002, Faber published a selection of his prose, Finders Keepers.

In October 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Product Details

• Paperback: 56 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (January 1, 1972)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571101267
• ISBN-13: 978-0571101269
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,668,153 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark, May 12, 2000

By 

Jeannie M. Zeck - See all my reviews

This review is from: Door into the Dark: Poems (Faber Paperbacks) (Paperback)

Seamus Heaney's collection of poems entitled Door into the Dark was originally published in 1969. Heaney is a Nobel laureate and it shows in this volume of poetry. Many of these poems focus on Heaney's native country of Ireland, the landscape, the rural people, the bloodshed. Sometimes Heaney takes you off the face of the planet and into a new realm. In the poem "The Penninsula," he gives the reader a sense of being on a narrow, tenuous stretch of land that seems uninhabited by humans:

The sky is tall as over a runway,/ The land without marks so you will not arrive/

But pass through, though always skirting landfall./ At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,/ The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable/ And you're in the dark again.

Many of the poems in this volume focus on rural people and the work they do, including a thatcher and a farm wife. As in other work of his, Heaney uses onomatopoeia with energy and exactness. He often forgoes traditional rhyme, but uses internal rhyme which contributes to the rhythm of the poem. Here are lines from "Thatcher" to illustrate my point: "He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,/ Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw." One of the fiercest poems in the collection is "Requiem for the Croppies." An Oxford English Dictionary is an important resource. I discovered that Croppies were Irish rebels who, in 1798, cropped their hair very short to show their alliance with the French Revolution. The sonnet seems to be a favorite form of Heaney; he uses it to describe the slaughter of the Irish rebels by English forces:

...on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave./ Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at canon./ The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave./ They buried us without shroud or coffin/ And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

I recommend keeping a dictionary nearby when you read any poetry and certainly when you read Heaney's work. You may want to look up words such as couchant, thatcher, tarn, and bespoke. A reader of poetry knows that every word of every poem is essential in appreciating and understanding the total meaning. Heaney's poetry is intense, challenging, and definitely worthwhile. I recommend any/all of his books.