HUMAN CHAIN By Seamus Heaney 85 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24 For a poet, life after the Nobel can be pottering, or bookkeeping, or simply keeping busy -- it's rarely full of radical departures or stunning new poems. (Eliot called the prize a ''ticket to one's own funeral,'' and indeed it proved the funeral of his poetry.) Even pottering can be...
HUMAN CHAIN By Seamus Heaney 85 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. MAGGOT By Paul Muldoon 134 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. The Northern Ireland-born poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon published their first books in 1966 and 1971, and ever since, their verse has been compared and contrasted, often in facile ways, as if they were...

DISTRICT AND CIRCLE By Seamus Heaney. 78 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $20. The reader -- who may well be you -- confronts a new book of poetry. How do you respond? What do you do with it? You read it, let's hope, but how do you evaluate its assertions, its questions, its incursions into a world that steadily and frenziedly unfolds independent of...
Seamus Justin Heaney (13. april 1939) er en (nord)irsk forfatter og professor ved universitetet i Oxford.
Han debuterede i 1966 med digtsamlingen Death of a Naturalist.
Heaney fik Nobelprisen i litteratur i 1995. I 2008 blev han æreskunstner i Østermarie og fik opkaldt Seamus Heaney Stræde efter sig. Irlands ambassadør i Danmark, Joseph Hayes, foretog indvielsen i Seamus Heaneys sted.
Han har bl.a. skrevet et digt om Tollundmanden, The Tollund Man.