Word: naturalists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests. /I'll dig with it." With these final words, the poem "Digging" began 1995 Nobel Prize winner and Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet Seamus Heaney's first collection of poems (Death of a Naturalist) in 1966, inaugurating an entire corpus of work that resonates majestically with themes of searching, wandering and exploring ever downward and inward. Each of his collections of poetry, while encompassing individually different personal, historical, social and political modes, echoes with similar thematic and imagistic ideas. Until now, there really was no comprehensive retrospective of Heaney's work...
...Seamus Heaney can do. The anthology contains works Heaney himself chose from among his rather extensive prosaic and prosodic output. The majority of the collection is made up of poems from all nine of Heaney's collections (spanning a thirty-year literary eternity from 1966's Death of a Naturalist to 1996's The Spirit Level), including the rarely published pamphlet of prose poems, Stations...
...chronological organization of the book shows the trajectory of Heaney's extensive digging motif over the course of his work. Digging first appeared in his earlier books such as Death of a Naturalist, Door Into the Dark, and to some extent the prose-poem collection Stations in their use of language to delve into the fertile cultural expanses of his childhood in Ireland. This "digging" into his private and cultural past (first addressed in his famous poem by that same name) soon unearthed the central myth of the bog people, men and women (apparently sacrificed to Mother Earth to guarantee...
Jack Aubrey is a fighting captain, brave and beefy, unsubtle except in naval matters and mathematics. Stephen Maturin, Irish and Catalan, sallow and scrawny, is a gifted surgeon who can whip off a shattered arm or leg and Bob's your uncle; he is also a naturalist, a rare linguist, and a shrewd intelligence agent for the British Admiralty...
...Pacific--that now seems bizarre. Ships were crushed. Men died of scurvy, watched by healthy Inuit tribesmen who were scorned as beasts. Ill-fated expeditions followed, intent on rescue, science or glory. One of these is Barrett's stage, on which two sharply opposed men, a bookish naturalist and a flamboyant expedition chief, struggle for the right to tell, or embellish, shabby truths. The chief ships an Inuit boy and his mother to the U.S., live specimens, and there she dies. That the naturalist manages to return the boy to his people is no victory, but merely--in a novel...