Product Description
Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott--three Nobel laureates and threeof our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologiesthat surround one of America's most famous and beloved deceased poets--RobertFrost.Amazon.com Review
Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, Nobellaureates all, have written perceptive, affectionate, admiring essayson Robert Frost. Eschewing both of the prevailing caricatures of Frost(the irascible but beloved cracker-barrel philosopher and the shallowmegalomaniac), these writers pay careful attention to the poemsthemselves. They open doors into the world of words that Frostconstructed, and help readers understand the music and the ideas inthose worlds. Derek Walcott's dark reading of Frost's much-quotedclassic, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," is aloneworth the price of Homage to Robert Frost. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

This is a wonderful companion to hearing Frost's seemingly off handed reading of his material
This is a marvelous little book to be savoured at every chance and to be re-read as well. Its instructive for both the reader of poetry and the writer of poetry and every student of poetry should read this little masterpiece.It contains many insights and adds a much needed depth to the Frost that many may suspect is not there. Brodsky's erudite rendering of Frost as a student of Virgil makes me want to run back to Virgil and read other works by him besides the Aeneid and go to The Eclogues, also called Bucolics.

Brodsky's explanation of Frost's work is the best I've seen
If you need to read one critical examination of Robert Frost,buy this& read Joseph Brodsky's fantastic, accessible take on "Home Burial".What a great book this is--three fine poets examining a brilliant poet.But it is Brodsky who best holds to the Frost credo--he speaks clearly and plainly.

A glimpse into how poets read poets
Brodsky, Heaney, and Walcott helped me hear the music of Frost's poetry. They don't analyze all that many poems but the insights they offer open the door to others. For example, I learned about Frost's idea of "Sentence-Sounds" in Brodsky's review of "Home Burial" and his idea of the "Sounds of Sense" in Heaney's discussion of "Desert Places". Then when I read Frost's "To a Thinker", which does not appear in "Homage to Frost", I came across the line "...From sound to sense and back to sound", and of course I recognized a familiar theme. If you like Frost, this book makes a nice companion reader. ... Read more

Product Description
Seamus Heaney is one of the most popular Irish poets writing today, and although his critics have recognized the centrality of the language of his poetry and his pronouncements on language, these aspects of his work have received little concentrated critical attention. Berhnard O'Donoghue, himself a poet, works chronologically through Heaney's poetry -- focusing on Heaney's writing on the appropriate language of poetry and his theory of poetry and the writer's responsibility to art and politics.Covers topics such as English or Irish lyric: 60s Heaney. Phonetics and feeling: from Wintering Out to Field Work. The limbo of lost worlds: the Sweeney complex. Beyond the alphabet: The Haw Lantern; Seeing Things. Heaney's 'Ars Poetica'; Dante and The Government of the Tongue.For those interested in modern and contemporary poetry, and Irish literature. ... Read more

Product Description
Provides an account of Seamus Heaney's early life, and the experiences, influences and relationships - personal, literary and political - that shaped his poetic development. The result of six years' research, this book includes a considerable amount of original material including photographs, interviews, insights into possible "sources" of his poems, commentary on unpublished poems and drafts, as well as readings of each of Heaney's collections including "Seeing Things". ... Read more

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This collection of 11 essays addresses the entire poetic oeuvre of Seamus Heaney up to and including "Seeing Things" and the verse-play "The Cure at Troy". The 11 contributors include poets and critics from Britain, America and Ireland. They examine a variety of aspects of Heaney's work, and open up, from various angles, the sources, directions, continuities and purposes of Heaney's career to date. Heaney has always been ready to try new things - these essays are designed to help the reader get a clearer view of the "figure in the carpet". The poetry is analyzed and assessed in its own right, but it is also discussed in relation to its literary, social and historical contexts. A spectrum of approaches is represented, from traditional humanist perspectives to those of poststructuralist, political and cultural criticism. In their concern with the values embodied in Heaney's acts of language, these essays make a contribution to the contemporary debate in Ireland. Elmer Andrews is the author of "The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper", and a contributing editor to "Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays". ... Read more

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In this thoughtful and carefully argued book, John Desmond uncovers Christian and transcendent elements in Seamus Heaney's poetry by reading it through the intellectual perspectives of the well-known poet Czeslaw Milosz and the French philosopher Simone Weil. Weil was a powerful influence on Milosz's thought and writing; Milosz, in turn, exercised considerable influence on Heaney's thought and poetry. Desmond utilizes these connections in order to show the way Weil's thought about Christianity and transcendence illuminates Heaney's complex relationship with Christianity. Desmond's sensitive readings of Heaney's poems through this new lens reveal previously unexplored depths in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning poet. ... Read more

Product Description
Poems exploring the theme of loss are joined by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein which will both surprise and delight the many admirers of his previous work.Amazon.com Review
Seamus Heaney describes the haw lantern as "small light forsmall people" but there is more than tiny illumination emanating fromone of Ireland's premier poets. Heaney peppers this short collection of poemswith crafty language and natural objects: "I heard the hatchet'sdifferentiated/Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh/And collapse of whatluxuriated/Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all." The HawLantern won England's Whitbread Prize in 1987. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Bittersweetness of Decay


The Haw Lantern
By Seamus Heaney
New York: The Noonday Press, 1987
52 pages


First, let us look at a simple, web-based definition of clearance, from

http://www.answers.com/topic/clearance:


The act or process of clearing.
A space cleared; a clearing.
The amount of space or distance by which a moving object clears something.
The height or width of a passage: an underpass with a 13-foot clearance.
An intervening space or distance allowing free play, as between machine parts.
Permission for an aircraft, ship, or other vehicle to proceed, as after an inspection of equipment or cargo or during certain traffic conditions.
Official certification of blamelessness, trustworthiness, or suitability.
A sale, generally at reduced prices, to dispose of old merchandise.
The passage of checks and other bills of exchange through a clearing-house.
Physiology.
The removal by the kidneys of a substance from blood plasma.
Renal clearance.



Since poets tend to be in love with words in and of themselves, the very sound and metaphor as well as their explicit meanings, my first thought on "Clearances," an eight-poem group in The Haw Lantern, was a
clearing - what you come across sometimes after wandering through woods.The volume's blurb tells us that the series is "a sonnte sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother."My first thoughts upon reading these poems was that the poet had spent some time wandering through other subjects - the woods - before arriving at stories about his mother.But clearance is not written until section 7, and it refers to emptiness felt immediately after the death of Mary Heaney: "Clearances that suddenly stood open./High cries were felled and a pure change happened."Nothing seems right after her death, we read in section 8:"the decked chestnut tree had lost its place .../my coeval/Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,/Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,/A soul ramifying forever/Silent, beyond silence listened for."

Loss and remembrance are thematic throughout The Haw Lantern, beginning with the first poem,"Alphabets," in which Heaney looks back on the days he learned to write, read, and his progression in both
through his early youth.He learns about letters with"A shadow his father makes with joined hands/ ...Like a rabbit's head.He understands/He will understand more when he goes toschool."His teacher shows him a trick for writing numbers - two is "A swan's neck and a swan's back/Make the 2 he can see nowas well as say."He associates the forms of objects with the alphabet:"A globe in the window tilts like a colored O [a lettermentioned four times in the poem]" and in its penultimate form reminds him of Roman Emperor Constantine's "You will conquer" - letters will never abandon him, though his youthful days it school are temporally irretrievable.Constantine's vision related to martialvictory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 ("In hoc
signo vinces"); Heaney's is of a future as a man of letters."O" would remain with him, allowing his fascination with language to come, literally, as in the shape of an "O," full circle with the "shadow."

In the second poem, "Terminus," the speaker becomes "the last earl on horseback in midstream.""Terminus" is less accessible to the general reader than "Alphabets."One has to have a keen awareness to its
allusions (are there still Earls in Northern Ireland, for example, and how does this subject, or symbol,relate to the poem?).If the poem is about poetry, the decision to become a writer, "Terminus" may be read as that liminal space right before a choice is made."Baronies, parishes met where I was born./When I stood on the central stepping stone/ ...I was the last earl on horseback in midstream/Still parleying, in earshot of his peers."It is not the words but the themes which are dense and harder to tease out.Still, the narrator is "in midstream," neither here, nor there, but he has left the school-houses of "Alphabets."

As it is explained to reader before opening the volume that a good deal of its poems are about Mary

Heaney (almost 25 percent of the 31 poems), "The Haw Lantern" seems lush with themes, from nature to Diogenes of Sinope (the one who went around Athens with his lamp, looking for an honest man), to life that
touches - then leaves - you.It may be useful to look at what a haw is, the hawthorn bush, with its "lantern" being the bulbous red fruit.The crataegus is indeed found in Europe, along with much of the rest of the world.Its seeds are in its fruit, and it commonly puts out small white flowers.It is also, although not always, can be a thorn
bush.(Please note that I am basing this on my own knowledge of the hawthorn from cultivating it over the years.Others' results may vary.)But in Heaney's hawthorn, one perceives something of wonder, that could be healing - or dangerous:

The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
the wick of self-respect from dying out.
not having to blind them with illumination.

"The wintry haw" may refer to the flowers, yet this is a bush "burning out of season" in the line's counterpoint.The plant is a guide to self-realization, but, in strophe two, it is also something which briefly affects you, before it "moves on.""It's blood prick that you wish would test and clear you,/its pecked-at-ripeness that scans you, then moves on."As we enter into a topographical historo-political metaphor in "Parable Island" and the fate of an ancestral king in "A Ship of Death" before moving to "Clearances," the thing that"scans" will become, on subsequent readings, a life, a person, who has passed away -but not before leaving his or her mark.

The second stanza of "The Milk Factory" is almost cathartic in contrast to the poems that came before it."There we go, soft-eyed calves of the dew,/Astounded and assumed into fluorescence."It is a kindly image,
but their life "of the dew" is not to be as they grow and take their
place into the world of the eponymous title, but
the couplet at the end gentles the reader after all the emotional deprivation of the earlier poems.
Yet misplacement returns, strongly, in "The Wishing Tree."Reminiscent of Shel Silverstein's book, The
Giving Tree (1994), the tree that is helpful even in its human-based ruin, we are back in a land of
anthropomorphized nature, a tree as a beloved who has passed on:

I thought I saw her as the wishing tree that died
And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,
Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

Need by need by need into its hale
Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail
Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

Newly-minted and dissolved, I had a vision
Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud.
Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

Still, all is not corrupt in The Haw Lantern.One of my favorite Heaney poems is about life, birth, and reconciliation."A Peacock's Feather," concerns the birth "Daisy, Daisy, English niece."Heaney says upfront, without the asking the reader to understand, that the poem is a love-song, "a billet-doux" to a newborn "Darkened with Celts' and Saxon's blood," and says "Let us pray.May tilth and loam,/ ... Breastfeed your love of house and wood."His Christening gift is the poem on her land, her spirit, 'Where this I drop for you, as I pass,/Like the peacock's feather on the grass."Although not the last poem in the volume, it is the most hopeful piece in a book that is concerned mainly with decay and the bittersweet.

A great volume
Another masterpiece by the great poet.The sequence concerning the death of poet's mother is extraordinarily moving. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Wintering Out
Wintering Out
Paperback
68 pages
Published by: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 9780571101580

When I read Fodder, Bog Oak, and Anahorish, with their language that almost breathes the rural landscape and its activities it is hard to imagine that Heaney was writing and publishing Wintering Out in 1971 and 1972, the years of McGurk's bar, Ballymurphy, and Bloody Sunday marking a sad high point for the Northern Irish Troubles, which in `72 alone saw 500 people killed.

Those first three poems give away nothing about the poems later in the book that open the ground beneath the reader to expose an ethno-political conflict and its deep effect on Heaney's writing in these years. The opening trilogy of Wintering Out is a slow moving portrait of an unsentimental rural life short of romantic pastoralism and full of cultural context and meaning for both poet and dwellers.

"With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills."

This is Anahorish, Heaney's `place of clear water', his childhood landscape around Mossbawn, where the inhabitants take on a quality through their working relationship with the landscape that for a second almost makes them collude with mythical mound-dwellers. At first this was just raw poetic beauty, but once I moved further into Wintering Out these images - created with the nouns and the place names of the land, Heaney's precision tools - started to make more sense as acts of place-making that tried to move away from the ethno-essentialization of Heaney's immediate present and show a bond between people and their landscape which has nothing to do with religion or other cultural vanities.

Wintering Out goes beyond the short scope of historical thinking of Heaney's countrymen to relocate a past much bigger, buried in the bogs of Ireland, which Heaney make emblematic of Irish identity and belonging. From the depths of bogs he draws his inspiration to write about a lifeworld where drizzle, mist, peat, moss, grass, rushes, cattle, and rivers dominate, but where "The softening ruts / lead back to no / `oak groves', no / cutters of mistletoe / in the clearings".

No sentimental gazes into a misty past here. It is not the country of current Troubles in which you live so much in the past that it has become a country of the past, rather it is a past dug up from bogs in both Denmark (in the poem The Tollund Man) and Ireland, which you can speak, name, place. And speaking the Irish words is a theme Heaney again and again explores in Wintering Out, both directly by emphasizing the vowel sounds and the guttural consonants, but also more subtly, like in Land IV:

"The tawny guttural water
speaks itself: Moyola
is its own score and consort,

bedding the locale
in the utterance"

Language shapes experience, and by speaking the place-names out loud we shape our surroundings in the process. We bed our locales. Yet, not everyone can just speak up and make the same meaning out of it. I think what lifts Heaney out of a mere poetry of places and people and into something else, into a poetry of human experience, a kind of phenomenology without the heavy going of continental philosophers on its back, is his ability to show in ever so few words how lifeworlds can be made and re-made by speaking about them. Paraphrasing the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld I'd say that Heaney can show what cultural intimacy means in just one sentence running through the length of three short verses in the celebrated poem Broagh:

"The garden mould
bruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the black O

in Broagh,
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades

ended almost
suddenly, like that last
gh the strangers found
difficult to manage."

Here is no doubt that more is at stake than pronunciations and the position of the tongue. In "A New Song" this is further explored when certain vowel sounds are made symbolic of the Irish language, while demesnes - the lands owned by feudal lords - hide out in the consonants. Heaney seems to urge people to move away from the Crown English and stay with the Irish sounds like they stay in Ireland on land that has been reclaimed from the old invader and is now growing green again "Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass".

These comments on unwanted English presence also mark the gliding transitions in Wintering Out that occur along the way as Heaney becomes more direct in his references to the Troubles and his struggles to understand them, or at least to understand himself in relation to them.

While poems like A Northern Hoard can be read as laments of armed conflict, and Heaney's own sense of inability to do much about it apart from writing about it, these parts of Wintering Out are also the ones that touch me the least. They become almost too outpsoken,direct and therefore slightly bland. But that is only in comparison with the splendor of the rest. I simply prefer his explorations of the things that work as prismatic reflections of the Troubles, like the trickster and outcast portraits of The Last Mummer, Servant Boy (who is "wintering out / the back-end of a bad year"), and Cairn-Maker that all tread paths which harbour no feelings for either of the warring sides but work to show potential alternatives to the present.

Moving into Part II of Wintering Out I would call a large part of these the anthropological poems. In a sense the whole book could be called that (couldn't all Heaney's poetry?), being one long social excavation. Wedding Day, Mother of the Groom and A Winter's Tale all explore customs, rituals, and life on the periphery of local communities that can only tolerate so much divergence from the paths of bounded culture.

They deal in some way with rites of passage or liminal states, a theme most clearly outlined in two poems: Shorewoman which works to remind me of the outcasts figures of North Atlantic stories, the men who were forced or voluntarily took to the hills and lived shadow existences there - and like here where it is a woman "walking the firm margin" at the shoreline instead. And Limbo, whose title gives it away, and in which the mother's drowning of an illegitimate child creates a rite for her passing back into the gated fold of community moral life:

"Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I'm sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ's palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there."

So much more could be said about these poems than I am able to. Scores of books exist in which learned people give their own interpretations of Heaney's peotry, and while I have just briefly touched upon a few of the themes in Wintering Out that I found the most fascinating, I would suggest to anyone to take the time and enjoy this marvellous collection of poetry. Anyone can read this, really, since anyone will thread their own line of meaning through the words. But I doubt that there will be anyone left untouched by the beauty of the poems
... Read more

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Thomas Flanagan — winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction — once wrote, "It is not the romantic, rather sentimental Ireland of many Irish-Americans that I love, but the actual Ireland, a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark." In these essays, Flanagan reflects on journeys through his own favorite parts of Ireland, past and present Irish history, and writers such as Yeats, O’Neill, Brian Moore, and John O’Hara, as well as Fitzgerald and Hemingway. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Intelligent gush, but gush all the same
There are scholars and there are critics, and then there are enthusiasts: Thomas Flangan falls somewhat into the latter camp. While this collection of pieces on Irish and Irish-American cultural figures he wrote for The New York Review of Books is often quite fine and imaginative, at times Flanagan is severely hampered by his inability to maintain a critical distance from his subjects,especially when it's someone he greatly admires, like John Ford or James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first two may be worthy of such high and unadulterated praise, but Fitzgerald? Even when dispelling popular myths about the latter, Flanagan has trouble reining in the gush, e.g. on THE GREAT GATSBY's status as a novel about the American Dream, Flanagan writes, "Scholars exchange their learned articles on the subject, and generations of college freshmen are told about it. If you whispered into a reader's sleeping ear the words 'Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY,' she would murmur drowsily, 'and the corruption of the American dream.'"

There's a pretty unhelpful introduction by Seamus Heaney that's more of a personal memoir of Flanagan than a way to orient oneself with regard to Flanagan's writings. ... Read more

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Eugene O'Brien's critical study examines the attitudetoward place and home in the works of Seamus Heaney. He looks at thepolitical role of Heaney's writing and argues that his complexengagement with these issues creates a pluralist and emancipatorysense of Irish identity predicated on the future rather than mired inthe past.

O'Brien's is the first book to trace an isolated theme in Heaney's work, in this case its creation of a politics of place, language, and identity. Unlike chronological studies of Heaney's poetry, O'Brien explores important elements in his entire oeuvre, from his poetry and prose to translations, such as the recent best-selling edition of Beowulf, that relate to the issue of writing and identity--strident nationalism, tribal identification, political ideology, and postcolonial poetics in particular. The first sustained engagement between literary theory and the work of Heaney, the book connects the ethical projects of Heaney and Derrida in terms of their views on the relationship between self and other, and between the present and the past.

O'Brien's close reading of Heaney's poems results in a wealth of original arguments; for example, his examination of the Irish poet's most famous book, North, views it as opening a dialogue with other traditions. Another unique emphasis is on the Viking influence on his work. Finally, O'Brien examines the relationship between Heaney's texts and the violence in Northern Ireland that has been the environment of much of his writing.

The most contemporary study of Heaney's writings to date--it extends to Electric Light and The Midnight Verdict--this book weaves critical theory and criticism, breaking with previous scholarship to present a reading of Heaney that extends far beyond moments of inspiration and symbolism to reach the very notion of identity and the individual's relationship to the past and present. ... Read more

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This book considers the way two Anglo-Irish poets, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, have used archaeology in their work, and how it surfaced in their lives. As well as providing new insights on Yeats and Heaney, their poetry and its analysis provides a filter for an original reading of the history of archaeology as it emerged from the mid-nineteenth century. Christine Finn draws on an array of data, tracing the path of the poets through museums, their childhood landscapes, and archaeological sites in Ireland, Italy and Scandinavia.
Past Poetic reveals the ways in which these two great poets received the past, as images in books and photographs, and as tangible objects. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fascinating for Literature Students and Archaeologists
This stunning, ground-breaking, punctiliously researched book considers the influence of archaeology on the work of two Irish poets to whom it was/is very important -- W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney.The section on Yeats includes fascinating details of the history of archaeology, particularly how the Greek and Roman discoveries which so captured Yeats's imagination came to be in the museums where he viewed them.Heaney is drawn not so much to classical antiquity as to the (more recent) discoveries of Bog Bodies in Ireland and Denmark (and the exact reason for the deposit of bog bodies is currently a hot topic in archaeology)."Past Poetic" is an extraordinary attempt to analyse the workings of the poetic mind.Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Product Description
In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Frazier's dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people, resources, and services are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier's arresting photographs take us into Iowa's abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals: Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer, Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier's camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.

This collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier's photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier's stunning images evoke the brilliance of Robert Frank's The Americans. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

beautiful pictures
They are depressing pictures. definitely if you were to take color photos in the spring and summer there would be a much different mood.it conveys sadness for a corner of the world which seems to be slowly dying away.the pictures really got at the core of what it means to be iowan, the snow and cold that you just deal with, the openess-- land that goes on forever with nothing hidden, the partying and drinking on one handand the amish on the other, the humility and lack of pretense of the people.

Driftless
Danny Wilcox Frazier's book of photographs, Driftless, is just that. The reportage/documentary style body of images is an aimless collection of photographs tethered together by the vague theme of "Iowa." Some are excellent, many are poor. There are many pictures that capture an utterly indecisive moment, causing one to wonder what its purpose in the book is. Nothing in the volume totally blew me away. Furthermore, the quality of the printing feels flimsy and the layout, with a combination of full bleed two-page spreads and smaller pictures vertically off-set on opposite pages, leaves a lot to be desired.

Oh, Iowa, you break my heart
Full disclosure: I am not qualified to write this review.I haven't really, thoughtfully perused the book yet...

Opposing argument: ...but the damn thing's been sitting on my coffee table since Christmas, and if it had looked more engaging to me when my husband (a devout Hawkeye) flipped through it after he unwrapped it, I'd have torn through that mofo three weeks ago.

I hate, hate, hate to say this about the work of someone from the clean, pure state of Iowa.But, the images struck me as depressing.And maybe that's the point!It's art, right?But then, plenty of National Geographic photos are bleak in nature without making you want to die a faster death.

My husband's only words: This cost 27 dollars?It seems a tad thin for 27 dollars.

Best Photo Book of '07
The sugar-coated, romanticized, or one dimensional view of "Middle-America" would have us believe that Iowa is only a land of covered bridges, fields of dreams, or over weight mall moms casting their red state ballots.But the world where Danny Wilcox Frazier lives is the real deal, and he explores it deeply with his camera in ways that are never sentimental and trite or judgemental and cruel. He finds stunning beauty and intrigue in the daily lives of real Iowans around him.

This is the most powerful collection of photography released in 2007. ... Read more

Product Description
Delivered while Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, these lectures cover subjects as diverse as Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and Marlowe's "Hero and Leander", as well as work by Yeats, Larkin and Dylan Thomas. ... Read more

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Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides. ... Read more