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Seamus Heaney – A Shiver  (Clutag Press, 2005)

Published: Summer/Fall    CONTENTS: nine new poems: ‘Hö’fn’, ‘Horace and the Thunder’, ‘Helmet’, ‘Testimony: The Ajax Incident’, ‘Testimony: Anahorish 1944’, ‘The Aerodrome’, ‘A Shiver’, ‘Out of Shot’, ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’. How Seamus Heaney has always held his ground, through thick and thin, is something of a miracle, like the preservation in a Danish peat-bog of the Tollund Man, now revisited in this collection (‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’) and given a clean bill of health. Here in A Shiver Heaney’s ground is reaffirmed, found and kept and a stance maintained, in lifelong love, though glaciers melt and Jupiter (after Horace, Odes I, 34) finds ground zero: ‘Anything can happen, the tallest things / Be overturned, those high places…

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