Book is 81 pp. At least three poems in it ("The Border Campaign," "The Fragment," and "On His Work in the English Tongue") form continued responses to Beowulf and to Heaney's engagement with it as a translator.

This poem of 62 lines in 5 numbered sections, inscribed "In memory of Ted Hughes," begins:

1

Post-this, post-that, post-the-other, yet in the end
Not past a thing. Not understanding or telling
Or forgiveness. (73)

And ends:

                 Things for the aye of God
And for poetry. Which is, as Milosz says,
"A dividend from ourselves," a tribute paid
By what we have been true to. A think allowed. (76)

Section 4 is a revised version of ll. 2444-65 of Heaney's full Beowulf translation. The section begins:

"Imagine this pain: an old man
Lives to see his son's body
Swing on the gallows.

And ends:

                            Such were the woes
And griefs endured by that doomed lord
After what happened. The king was helpless
To set to right the wrong committed …" (75-76; ellipsis and quotation marks in original)

Not in MO2.

BAM (from 1st U.S. edition, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).