Navigating the ‘North’ Collection

Foreword

• Introduction
• Biographical ‘events’ between 1968-1975
• Themes and issues
• Enrichment
• Dedications
• Lexical focus
• Comments contemporary to Publication
• Comments from main source authors (as below)
• Heaney’s further insights
• The structure of North

The North Poems  individual commentaries with footnotes and reflections on style and structure

• Part I
  • Act Of Union
  • Aisling
  • Antaeus
  • Belderg
  • Bog Queen
  • Bone Dreams
  • Come to the Bower
  • Funeral Rites
  • Hercules and Antaeus
  • Kinship
  • North
  • Ocean’s Love to Ireland
  • Punishment
  • Strange Fruit
  • The Betrothal of Cavehill
  • The Digging Skeleton
  • The Grauballe Man
  • Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
• Part II
  • Freedman
  • Singing School
    • 1 The Ministry of Fear
    • 2 A Constable Calls
    • 3 Orange Drums
    • 4 Summer 1969
    • 5 Fosterage
    • 6 Exposure
  • The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream
  • Whatever You Say Say Nothing
• The Seed Cutters

Afterthoughts

• A historical timeline plotting the countdown to the ‘Troubles’
• The ‘bog  poems’ and ‘political correctness’
• Finding the blend; the  poet’s compositional skills
• The poem as a ‘music pleasing to the ear’
• Using assonance: ‘coloured sound’ is an attempt to highlight recurrent sounds in a poem using phonetic symbols and colour shades; ‘same colour, same sound’
• Standard English sounds and their phonetic symbols
• Using alliteration
• Forms and Rhymes; summary – the poems in collection-order
• Subjects and Settings: summary – the poems in collection-order.
• Stylistic devices: labels and definition