Synopses & Reviews
Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish "Troubles" beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and map--the spirit region, that world beyond our ken.
Review
"In this study of Heaney's Northern Irish regionalism, Baylor University English professor Russell (Poetry and Peace) neatly traces the impact of the author's Ulster roots across his poetry, politics, culture, and spirituality. Russell delves into the political and cultural implications of a divided Ireland, noting that Heaney was an optimistalways imagining "a new region of Northern Ireland," healed and undivided. . . . A substantial and magisterial work of literary criticism, Russell's volume stands as a valuable companion to Heaney's writing." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Richard Rankin Russells new study, Seamus Heaneys Regions, is the first which is able to take account of the full run of Heaneys oeuvre. While it was completed before August 2013, it is also, of course, the first study to appear since Heaneys death last summer . . . . Russells work is deeply sensitive to the ethical dimension of Heaneys writing, and he is concerned to emphasise and laud the beneficent conscience of the poet as it is manifest in his work throughout a writing career of nearly 50 years. . . . Another merit of the book, for first-time students of Heaney and longstanding readers and critics alike, is that Russell is scrupulous in dealing with and responding to a staggering number of the critical opinions which have emerged from that industrial load of scholarship." The Oxonian Review
About the Author
Richard Rankin Russell is professor of English and 2012-2013 Baylor Centennial Professor at Baylor University.