Seamus Heaney

A New York Times Bestseller and Whitbread Book of the Year. Heaney's performance reminds us that Beowulf, written near the turn of another millennium, was intended to be heard not read. Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his...

In this collection, as ever with Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects -- a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing -- are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert, and completely truthful.

Sophocles' play stands as a timely exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual's human rights and those who must protect the state's security. During the War of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone learns that her brothers have killed each other, having been forced onto opposing sides. When Creon, king of Thebes, grants burial of one but not the "treacherous" other, Antigone defies his order, believing it her duty to bury all...

The long-awaited paperback edition of Selected Poems, revised and updated with more than forty new poems never before published in English. 2011 marks the centenary year of one of the twentieth century's most important poets, Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. To mark the occasion, Anthony Milosz has translated into English the last poems his father wrote, granting readers new insight into the work of an unparalleled master of the form.

For this companion to her "New York Times"-bestselling collection "A Family of Poems," Kennedy has hand-selected more than 100 of her favorite poems that lend themselves to memorization.