New Selected Poems 1966-1987

Our second Collectors’ Edition presents Seamus Heaney’s own selection from the first half of his extraordinary career. Sewn and quarter-bound in cloth by hand in Yorkshire, this edition has a first impression of only 400 copies.

From the outset, Seamus Heaney’s writing was ‘mature and certain in its touch’, as Austin Clarke conferred in the Irish Times, throughout a run of epoch-making volumes in the 1960s and ’70s: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). The bravura pieces of Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984) that followed culminated in the Whitbread Prize for Poetry with The Haw Lantern (1987).

Since its original publication in 1990, New Selected Poems 1966-1987 has become a seminal edition, containing many of Seamus Heaney’s most cherished and studied poems, ‘Digging’, ‘Mid-Term Break’, ‘The Tollund Man’ and ‘Casualty’ among them. Together with its later, sibling volume, New Selected Poems 1988-2013, it opens the story on Seamus Heaney’s calling as a poet.