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 17 lines, inscribed "For Nadine Gordimer," begins:

Soot-streaks down the courthouse wall, a hole
Smashed in the roof, the rafters in the rain
Still smouldering: (21)

And ends:

Every nail and claw-spike, every spur
And hackle and hand-barb on that heathen brute
Was like a steel prong in the morning dew. (21; italics in original)

The second half of the poem directly refers to the passage in Beowulf in which people come to gaze on Grendel's dismembered arm at Heorot, and the final lines as quoted above are an alternative rendering of ll. 984-87 to the one Heaney gave in his 1999 full translation.

Floyd Collins, Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity (University of Delaware Press, 2003), 213-14.

Not in MO2.

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