This series is designed to help students shorten revision time, remember more and obtain higher grades. This text covers themes, settings and characters, and contains questions to develop a personal view of the text, essay practice and mind maps which summarize what students should know.

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence" of "Cattle out in rain" - are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present - a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier - are fraught with this same anxiety. But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems which "do the rounds of the district" - its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts - the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals. District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

This volume contains a selection of work from each of Seamus Heaney's published books of poetry up to and including the Whitbread prize-winning collection, The Haw Lantern (1987). '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

Seamus Heaney first achieved recognition with the publication of his early poems in Belfast newspapers in 1961. Since then, he has been hailed by Robert Lowell as 'the most important Irish poet since Yeats', won an unprecedented number of literary prizes and awards, drawn wide-ranging critical acclaim and achieved sales that are rare in the world of poetry . Most school and university students will have studied Heaney's work, and many will have heard him speak during his frequent lecture tours and television appearances. More than any other twentieth-century poet, Heaney has brought a mass audience to the arena of serious poetry. In this Readers' Guide, Elmer Andrews explores the critical debates surrounding Heaney's work and popular appeal. Issues of cultural identity and nationality, debates on the power of language and the function of verse are clarified and explored in the writings gathered in this volume. Beginning with consideration of the early collection, Death of a Naturalist, the Guide reviews and contextualises the material on successive volumes so that students of Heaney's verse will find an accessible pathway through the most important critical writings on this major poet.

Seamus Heaney's poetic career has been one of constant development and expansion, and his place among the world's greatest literary figures is universally acknowledged. When it first appeared in 1986, Neil Corcoran's A Student's Guide to Seamus Heaney was immediately recognized as the clearest and most thorough account of his work so far, and it has not been rivalled since.

A dazzling short assessment of the life and work of the poet and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature, by one of the finest literary critics now writing.

In awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney in 1995, the committee recognized a lifetime of beautiful and profound writing, beloved by readers around the world.

New Notes Advanced have been written by acknowledged literature experts for the specific needs of advanced level of undergraduate students. They offer a fresh and accessible approach to the study of English literature.