In this second edition of his popular volume on Heaney, Andrew Murphy offers an accessible and wide-ranging study of the poets work, charting the trajectory of Heaneys career and placing his work within its various contexts. Seamus Heaney is one of the foremost poets of his generation and his work is highly prized by scholars and general readers alike. It is a measure of his success as a writer, and of the high-esteem in which he is held, that he has been appointed to professorships at both Harvard and Oxford and that he was, in 1995, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The appeal of Heaneys poetry lies in its gracefulness, its