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A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate.
Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the four-squareness of the utterance in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.
The Spirit Level was the first book of poems Heaney published after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Reviewing this book in The New York Times Book Review, Richard Tillinghast noted that Heaney has been and is here for good . . . [His poems] will last. Anyone who reads poetry has reason to rejoice at living in the age when Seamus Heaney is writing.
*Winner of the 2015 Guardian First Book Award*
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body - to male friendship and male love - muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan's own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn's torque and speed - 'your kiss was deep enough to stand in' - the poems in this first collection confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory. Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present - drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan's eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart. Winner of the 2015 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize
Winner of the 2006 Costa Poetry Award
Letter to Patience is a book-length poem in iambic pentameter, set in 'Patience's Parlour', a small, mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria in 1993 - a time of political unrest. The writer of the letter has returned to Britain, with his Nigerian wife and children, to nurse his dying father. He writes to Patience, the bar's owner, a woman in her 30s who once lectured in politics at Ahmadu Bello University, across the main road from her bar. She gave up her job partly because of junta pressures on radical academics. The town is volatile - the bar was attacked by the so-called Ayatollahs and would have been burnt had it not backed onto the property of her Hausa landlord. There are also thoughtful and elegant digressions thrown up by the multiple narratives. The book is not merely biography or an essay on colonialism and post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful and troubled country and one man's search for meaning in difficult times. A marvellous book, an exemplar of sorts; as for the virtuosity it is entirely at the service of a vision.
