The Story Archive

Electric Light

Seamus Heaney · 2001 CE · Poem · English · Contemporary

Poems of boyhood in Mayo and Derry, a pair of eclogues after Virgil, and elegies for Ted Hughes and Joseph Brodsky gather around the electric light of a farmhouse childhood. Heaney reaches back to the classical pastoral to place the Northern Irish present. A late-middle collection by the Nobel poet, in which the classical frame is borrowed to make sense of the local.

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