Word: apeneck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unearthed five volumes of poetry, including the bestseller Field Work (1979). Sweeney Astray, to be published next May by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, provides a festival of Heaneyan contradictions. The hero is a modernist ideal: wounded, cunning, lyrical and deranged. His name inescapably recalls T.S. Eliot's Irish vulgarian "Apeneck Sweeney ... among the nightingales." Yet Heaney's man is not a commoner but a king, and he does not merely listen to birds, he becomes one. Sweeney Astray is in fact not an original poem but a brilliant rendition of the 7th century Irish legend Buile Suibne...