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Sat 08 Aug 2008A passion for print and poetry
Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography 1959-2003 By Rand Brandes and Michael A Durkan Faber, 527pp. £50THIS BOOK makes no secret of the fact that it is aimed at specialists, containing as it does only four pages that are not structured as a list.
These are Rand Brandes's introduction, in which he explains the genesis of this book as a checklist in the Irish Literary Review in 1986 and briefly notes Seamus Heaney's work's "distinctive permutations and variations" and his commitment to poetry as a public art. Brandes is in a better position than most to discuss how Heaney's poems and prose have been transmitted, but he quickly abandons the reader among the lists, which slowly exert a dusty fascination.
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