“... Seamus Heaney has always doubted poetry – not as a philosopher might doubt reality, but as a rich man might doubt money. He feels not scepticism, but guilt. He thanks poetry for existing but is tormented by the size of its donation. Poetry, he suspects, has no right to its wealth; so he lavishes scruples on his readers ...”

“... wind moves slowly in the branches.The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Wallace Stevens on the LRB ...”

“... rather than being an ‘organised’ regiment of counterpoised attitudes. In this way, as Seamus Perry says in his admirable introduction to the grand, fully annotated Oxford edition of this very miscellaneous book, ‘the poet’s inward conflicts, explored so dazzlingly in Ambiguity, are cast as versions of the conflicts that shape the culture ...”

“... or correct, or displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a good way. Stepping Stones is not quite Heaney’s autobiography: it is, instead, a long collection of interviews, revised collaboratively, in which Heaney describes each phase of his life. Only a poet of ...”

“... In​ one of those engagingly innocent-seeming anecdotes Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height ...”

“... When Seamus Heaney left Belfast in 1972, to work as a freelance writer in the relative safety of the Republic, Northern Ireland was a war zone. Internment and Bloody Sunday had recruited so many to the Provisional IRA that Civil Rights marches had given way to carbombs. While Heaney in County Wicklow wrote the poems that would go into North, common ground was eroded ...”

“... constitute a revival. The recent Cambridge Companion to Coleridge has a remarkable essay by Seamus Perry on ‘The Talker’, which in itself would serve as an excellent general introduction to the writer in both literary and philosophical terms. He has also edited a well-judged and helpfully annotated selection from Coleridge’s Notebooks that is ...”

“... forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.  Listen to Mark Ford in conversation with Seamus Perry about Wallace Stevens on the LRB ...”

“... his sermons. Mueller’s editorial choices follow the guidelines developed by the series editor, Seamus Perry, to ‘convey something of the circumstances of the original appearances of the texts’. On historical grounds this is a worthwhile goal, and by printing the two manuscripts she has found an effective way to meet it. Short of reading the ...”

“... words,Of the planet of which they were part.Prospero was something in insurance.  Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Wallace Stevens on the LRB ...”

“... in Santa Cruz, recently liberated from the metal halo, tending to a collection of cacti.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Adrienne Rich on the LRB ...”

“... still fathomless – not least to herself.Listen to Joanne O’Leary discuss Emily Dickinson with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on the LRB ...”