Hearing Heaney

The sixth Seamus Heaney lectures

Eugene McNulty & Ciarán Mac Murchaidh editors

‘The diverse essays presented here together make a book that provides both up-close detail and a thought-provoking overview of the man and his work … The essays examine Heaney in his guises as poet, playwright, educator, critic and public figure … this [is a] lively and compelling volume … This is a book by educators about an educator, and also a book by critics about a critic … Heaney’s unexpected death in August 2013 sadly meant that this book took on a role for which it was no envisaged at its inception: as a generous and worthy memorial to a great poet’, Adam Hanna, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (2016).

‘An intuitively well-pitched and abundantly generative proposal for meditations of [Heaney’s] work … here it prompts, in the editors’ valuable and consistently enlightening introduction, discussion of key aspects of Heaney’s work and writing life which are picked up in the essays. Central to the appeal of Hearing Heaney is its intellectual diversity. These essays are not exclusively literary-critical, and they make refreshing contributions to Heaney studies … taken together, they offer an exemplar for interdisciplinary exchange on a literary subject’, Rosie Lavan, Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 2017).