New Selected Poems 1966-1987 - Tapa dura

"His is "close-up" poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does". (John Banville). "More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of". (John Carey). "Heaney's voice, by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive, is one of a suppleness almost equal to consciousness itself". (Helen Vendler).

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.District and Circle was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Stepping Stones, a book of interviews by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Human Chain was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection.