-Foreword

Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern is the poet’s seventh collection published by Faber and Faber in 1987. By that stage Seamus Heaney is a highly cultured, sensitive, northern Irish Catholic approaching fifty settled in the family home in Dublin. He has a part-year Professorship at Harvard University and receives invitations from around the globe. His nature is modest, sociable and self-questioning; he is a magician with words and the subtle shades of meaning they enclose and is gifted with a photographic memory. ‘The Haw Lantern’ is intellectually demanding, thoughtful and innovative … it ponders, measures, selects and judges. The book demonstrates the erudition and vitality of his earlier work adding a sequence of eight cathartic sonnets addressed to his mother’s […]