Death of a naturalist/seamus heaney

Description For the fortieth anniversary of its publication, in May 2006, Faber are reissuing Seamus Heaneys classic first collection, Death of a Naturalist, which on its appearance in 1966 won the Cholmondeley Award, the E.

Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry.

The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems Ive read for some time.

Cox in the Spectator The power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death of a Naturalist is outstanding .

] His subject is those things which are inherent or inherited.

What he praises is to be praised in his own work.

- Christopher Ricks, New Statesman Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity.

I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.