The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose
is the first collection of essays solely focused on examining the Nobel prize winning poet’s prose. The collection offers ten different perspectives on this body of work which vary from sustained thematic analyses on poetic form, the construction of identity, and poetry as redress, to a series of close readings of prose writing on poetic exemplars such as Robert Lowell, Patrick Kavanagh, W.B Yeats, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Brian Friel. Seamus Heaney’s prose is extensive in its literary depth, knowledge, critical awareness and its span. During the course of his life, he published six collections of prose entitled
Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978
,
Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland
The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings
The Place of Writing
The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures
and
Finders Keepers
. Each of these texts is addressed in the collection alongside occasional and specific essays such as ‘Crediting Poetry’, ‘Writer and Righter’ and ‘Mossbawn via Mantua: Ireland in/and Europe, Cross-currents and Exchanges’, among many others. This book is a comprehensive and timely study of Seamus Heaney’s prose from leading international scholars in the field.