Station Island

First edition. Crown 8vo. 123 pp. Black cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Notes. First state (with the half-title page serving as the front free endpaper). There was a further, bibliographically unrecorded state, issued in grey cloth boards and bound with endpapers. Poetry Book Society Recommendation with its flyer tipped in.

Author's sixth separate collection of poetry. An autobiographical narrative sequence in which the poet guiltily confronts ghosts from his past, preceded by a section of short lyrical verses and bookended by the voice of seventh century Ulster King Sweeney. This central section, which shares the volume's title, recounts a Dantesque purgatorial pilgrimage to Lough Derg in Co. Donegal, a demanding penitential journey that Heaney thrice undertook as a youngster.

But whereas in earlier collections, he used his art to articulate the concerns of his tribe, here his rueful questioning of the role of art in a political setting is artfully put to the use of his own personal growth. The challenge is to find a "middle way" to express duty and freedom – what he calls "a cunning middle voice" in "Making Strange" (pp. 32–3). Anyhow, his "temper is not Brechtian", he subsequently told Melvyn Bragg in a 1991 interview upon publication of Seeing Things.

Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. "Surpasses even what one might reasonably expect from this magnificently gifted poet." –John Carey, Sunday Times

[Brandes & Durkan A36a]