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Seamus Heaney
The Midnight Verdict
Price $1,550 Buy Now

Seamus Heaney
The Midnight Verdict

Gallery Books - 1993. First Edition. Hardcover. limited edition of 1,000 copies 75 of which are numbered and signed by the author, and reserved for Patrons of the Gallery Press. Excellent condition, Very fine dust jacket. This copy i snot numbered, but is Signed by Heaney.
A Poet's Anxiety in Seamus Heaney's The Midnight Verdict
Seamus Heaney's The Midnight Verdict is a bold, ambitious—and neglected--

work. It is bold in structure: Heaney sandwiches an eighteenth century Irish comic poem between Ovid's account of Orpheus's loss of Eurydice (in book X of the Metamorphoses) and Orpheus's death (in book XI). Its ambition is implied in what Heaney observes of Merriman's The Midnight Court, from which he takes excerpts to compose The Midnight Verdict: it contributes to "the construction of a desirable civilization" (Heaney 1995, 57). No one has yet assessed Heaney's own contribution to the construction of such a civilization in Midnight Verdict, which is the aim of the present essay.

To compose Midnight Verdict Heaney draws on Merriman's Midnight Court. He borrows the female bailiff, who is a monstrous, threatening creature, the judge, Aoibheall, who ultimately condemns Merriman (a character in his own poem) to scourging as punishment, and the young woman who prosecutes the case. But because Heaney omits the defense by the male defendant, Midnight Verdict sounds less like a true court proceeding than Midnight Court, and more like a diatribe against males.

Heaney's choice of Ovid's narrative of the Orpheus myth over Virgil's conforms to this pattern of hostility. Unlike Virgil, Ovid gives the maenads a voice, and it echoes Merriman's prosecutor, hic est nostri contemptor! (XI 7). Ovid (Metamorphoses XI 1-43) devotes much more graphic detail than Virgil (Georgics IV 520-522) to the slaughter of Orpheus by the maenads. In addition, Ovid's narrative is more congruent with the comic mode of Merriman's Midnight Court than Virgil's. Ovid, like Merriman, "exploits almost every opportunity to circumvent pathos" (Anderson 475) by contriving a happy ending and inviting laughter to keep serious matters at an emotional distance. Ovid even manages to inject comedy into the killing of Orpheus with "un excès de logique" (Frécaut 169-170).

Heaney's essay on Merriman, "Orpheus in Ireland," helps us understand what Heaney is doing in Midnight Verdict. He sees in Merriman's Midnight Court two distinct ways in which the text contributes to "the construction of a desirable civilization." First, for the people of the eighteenth century the poem served the cause of liberation by opposing "sexual repression and a censorship obsessed with sexual morality." More recently, Heaney says, the poem has served the cause of liberation in a different way, as a "paradigm" of the movement to relocate women into the center of consciousness, language, and institutions (Heaney 1995, 53).

But Heaney undercuts both of these aims in Midnight Verdict when he associates Merriman's prosecuting women with irrational maenads (Bradley 483). We come closer to the heart of Midnight Verdict in Heaney's observation about reading Merriman's poem in company with Ovid's Orpheus narrative. We recognize, says Heaney, a "male anxiety about suppressed female power, both sexual and political" (Heaney 1995, 61). Support for seeing this "male anxiety about suppressed female power" at the center of Midnight Verdict comes from a suggestion Corcoran makes, that in fact we have a third Orpheus figure—after Ovid's Orpheus and Merriman—in Heaney himself, yet another poet who has been charged with neglecting women. Corcoran wonders if the publication of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, for which Heaney had "responsibility," and which was vigorously attacked for its neglect of women (Bradley 483, Crowe), was not a "spur" to Heaney's composition of Midnight Verdict in 1993 (Corcoran 187).

But the question remains: Does The Midnight Verdict contribute "to the construction of a desirable civilization"? Yes and no. Yes, it helps that in The Midnight Verdict Heaney reveals for inspection a male anxiety that fears the consequences of its own acts of neglect. On the other hand, the text is hardly liberating—a favorite word for Heaney in "Orpheus in Ireland"—when, as Bradley notes, it sees women as crazed maenads. Indeed, in rehearsing gender stereotypes (as he does elsewhere, Brearton) without identifying them as such, Heaney makes his reader wonder if he has painted a sufficiently searching portrait.

HEANEY, Seamus
Sweeney Astray.
Price $600 Buy Now

HEANEY, Seamus
Sweeney Astray.

Published by A Field Day Press;- in Derry, 1983, - HEANEY, Seamus. Sweeney Astray . A version from the Irish. Derry: A Field Day Publication, 1983. First Printing. 1st. Issue;- Signed by Heaney in 1984 in Kilkenny;- 8vo, green card covers. The Nobel Prize-winning Irish author's translation of Buile Suibhne, the tale of Sweeney, a legendary medieval king of Ulster, "one of the major achievements in the canon of medieval literature" -
Stunning copy of a very collecable book of poems.
Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish is a version of the Irish Poem, Buile Shuibhne written by Seamus Heaney and published in 1983. It is based on an earlier translation by J.G. O'Keeffe. Heaney's version was well received in many circles and, much like his later take on Beowulf, has largely become the standard translation on college syllabi.

Sweeney Astray is a masterpiece on many levels: for the complex weave of its themes to the lyrical quality of its prose—accentuated greatly, of course, by Seamus Heaney's virtuoso translation. We follow mad Sweeney in his crazed wanderings through the forest and hills, torn within himself by his love of the wild and his incurable loneliness. The tale is presented as chunks of narrative interspersed with segments of poetry, their quiet, melancholy beauty evoking the sounds of windsong and rain.

The poem served as inspiration for a collection of photographs by Rachel Giese which was published, side by side with excerpts from the poem, under the title Sweeney’s Flight.

Heaney, Seamus
The Riverbank Field
Price $800 Buy Now

Heaney, Seamus
The Riverbank Field

Loughcrew, Oldcastle Co Meath, Ireland: Gallery Books, 2007. Book. Illus. by Martin Gale. New. Hardcover. Signed by Author(s). 1st Edition. 1st. Issue. Limited to 500 numbered copies, of which only 450 are for sale, signed by Seamus Heaney on the limitation page. This is 193;- Green cloth-covered boards. Colour paintings and drawings by Martin Gale. Plain dustjacket finished with mottled effect in green and white; fitted with protective sleeve. Both book and dustjacket are in very fine condition. Copy 193 is Signed by Seamus Heaney to the back page. Stunning Copy.
Virgil in Seamus Heaney's Human Chain
If Dante presides over Heaney's Field Work and much of his subsequent poetry (Corcoran 84), Virgil presides over the 2010 collection Human Chain. The sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid—whose contribution to the collection has not been discussed—informs two poems, ten pages altogether, in the center of the collection. "The Riverbank Field" points to a passion for life. Death is the central theme of "Route 110," immediately following. This paper makes three points: that Heaney locates these two Virgilian poems in the center of Human Chain to make their centrality to the whole collection clear—they express an urgent vitality that acknowledges death without yielding to it, a vitality that is echoed by other poems in the collection; that in his remembrance of his father in "Album" Heaney draws on Aeneid VI once again, to balance the finality of death in "Route 110" with a kind of "resurrection,” and that Heaney explicitly establishes reception as a theme in both “The Riverbank Field” and “Route 110,” showing how he makes Virgil's Aeneid VI his own because it offers "images and symbols adequate to our predicament" (Preoccupations 56).

In "The Riverbank Field" Heaney draws on Aeneid VI to celebrate his native land as a place whose aesthetic beauty explains a passion for living. Heaney begins by confessing that he cannot translate Virgil's account of Elysium without thinking of the world around him. He shifts from the Loeb translation to his own words to make the poem fully his own, "And soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood / Under the dome of the sky." Here Heaney turns Virgil upside down to claim that Elysium is the world in which he lives, its sensuous beauty justifying life.

FLORENCE FARR, BERNARD SHAW
AND W. B. YEATS
Price $ 160 Buy Now

Farr, Florence, George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats. Clifford Bax, Ed
FLORENCE FARR, BERNARD SHAW AND W. B. YEATS

Published by The Cuala Press Dublin:- 1941;- 1st. Edition, limited to 500 numbered copies. Copy 132. Edited by Clifford Bax. Set in Caslon type and printed by Esther Ryan and Maire Gill. Paper-covered boards with quarter cloth spine and printed label along the spine ;- This copy is un-cut paper; Never been read;- A very fine copy from The Cuala Press;- $160.