The Letters of Seamus Heaney Song of the Absent Brook to the poet's friends and

to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms—form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire

part metaphysical reckoning

destruction and transformation

what imagination is possible under the scarcest of conditions

and the knowledge of her own inevitable death

The Letters of Seamus Heaney Song of the Absent Brook to the poet's friends andSeamus Heaney "Every now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two" For all his public eminence, Seamus Heaney seems never to have lost the compelling need to write personal letters. In this ample but discriminating selection from fifty years of his correspondence, we are