A Singing Contest : Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Meg Tyler here presents a formal analysis which comprises close readings of Seamus Heaney's poetry; whose work, in an era of fractured poetry, stands out as it strives towards unity and regeneration. "A Singing Contest" is a welcome return to the practice of close reading and formal analysis at it moves away from the highly-politicized theoretical readings of literature that have inundated literary studies over the two decades.

By a detailed structural analysis of diction, meter, imagery and generic form, Tyler illustrates how Heaney's poems create concords from discord and unities from fracture.

She considers the interplay between different kinds of literary tradition and community in his poetry.

Incorporating readings of Heaney's elegies, pastoral eclogues and sonnets, "A Singing Contest" will serve undergraduates of all levels as an excellent introduction to formal analysis and close reading, and graduate students as a model of formal analysis.