| Bookshelf Death
Of A Naturalist
Heaney’s past still proves one of his best
 On
its original appearance in 1966 40 years ago Death Of A Naturalist won
the Cholmondeley Award, the Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award
and the Geoffrey Faber Prize.
“The power and precision of his best poems are a delight and as
a first collection Death Of A Naturalist is outstanding. His subject is
those things which are inherent or inherited. What he praises is to be
praised in his own work,” said Christopher Ricks of the New Statesman.
Other critics have said: “We confidently expect him to braoden
his range and our imaginative estate” and: “The full-blooded
energy of these poems makes Death Of A Naturalist the best first book
of poems I’ve read for some time.”
Available to buy from April this new edition of Death Of A Naturalist
is published by Faber and Faber.
Heaney was born in Co. Derry in the North of Ireland. Death Of A Naturalist
— his first collection of poems — appeared in May 1996 and
since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have
established him as one of the leading poets of his generation.
He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for This Spirit Level
and Beowulf. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His 12th and most recent collection — District And Circle —
is published in April 2006.
Death Of A Naturalist by Seamus Heaney is published by Faber and Faber,
£8.99.
The GPO And The Easter Rising (Keith Jeffery)
All existing accounts of the GPO in 1916 concentrate on the Volunteers
who occupied the building on Easter Monday. But what of those Dubliners
and others who were working in the Post Office that morning?
Their experiences have been largely ignored in all the subsequent historiography.
While not neglecting the rebels, this book tells their story too using
hitherto unpublished material drawn from the treasure-trove of documents
relating to the Rising held in the British Post Office Archives, which
has remained unexploered for 90 years and never before been exploited
by historians.
This material is complemented with further important unpublished material
from the British National Archives as well as other vivid eyewitness accounts
first published shortly after the Rising. These new accounts are combined
with the stories told in The Sinn Féin Rebellion As They Saw It
— published by Irish Academic Press — and together they bring
a strikingly fresh perspective to the history of the Rising.
Keith Jeffery was educated in Ireland, the USA and Cambridge, where he
won the Prince Consort Prize and Seeley Medal. For over 20 years he taught
history at what was successively the Ulster Polytechnic and then the University
of Ulster at Jordanstown.
Sea Change (Robert B. Parker)
When the partially-decomposed body of a woman washes ashore in Paradise,
Massachusetts police chief Jesse Stone is forced into a case far more
difficult than it at first appears.
Identifying the woman is just the first step in what proves to be a very
difficult and emotionally-charged investigation.
Florence Horvath was an attractive, recently-divorced heiress from Florida.
She also had a penchant for steamy sex and it was her past and present
which both got her killed.
But no-one is talking — not the crew of the Lady Jane, the Fort
Lauderdale yacht moored in Paradise harbour; nor her very blonde, very
tanned twin sisters, Corliss and Claudia; and not her curiously affectless
parents living out a sterile retirement in a Miami high-rise.
But someone — Jesse — has to speak for the dead even if
it puts her in harm’s way.
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh: The Life And Politics
of an Irish Revolutionary (Robert W. White)
Since the mid-1950s Ruairí Ó Brádaigh has occupied
a singular role in the Irish Republican Movement.
He is the only person who has served as Chief of Staff of the Irish
Republican Army, as president of the political party Sinn Féin,
and to have been elected, as an abstentionist, to the Dublin Parliament.
Today he is the most prominent and articulate spokesperson of those
Irish Republicans who reject the peace process in Northern Ireland. His
rejection is rooted in his analysis of Irish history and his belief that
the peace process will not achieve peace, but rather will support the
continued partition of Ireland and result in inevitable, conflict.
The child of Irish Republican veterans Ó Brádaigh has led
IRA raids, been arrested and interned, escaped and been on the run and
even spent time on a hunger strike.
An articulate spokesman for the Irish Republican cause, he has at different
times been excluded from Northern Ireland, Britain, the United States,
and Canada.
He was a key figure in the secret negotiations of a bilateral IRA-British
truce.
His Notes on these negotiations offer special insight into the 1975 truce,
the IRA ceasefires of the 1990s, and the current peace process in Ireland.
Ó Brádaigh has been a staunch defender of the traditional
Republican position of abstention from participation in the parliaments
in Dublin, Belfast and Westminster.
When Sinn Féin voted to recognise these parliaments in 1970, he
led the walkout of the party convention and spearheaded the creation of
Provisional Sinn Féin. He served as president of Provisional Sinn
Féin until 1983 when he was forced out by his successor, Gerry
Adams.
In 1986, with Adams as its president, Provisional Sinn Féin recognised
the Dublin Parliament. Ó Brádaigh led another walkout and
later became president of Republican Sinn Féin — a position
he holds to this day.
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