Reading around the pairing
Read more, hear more
The best preparation is time with the collections themselves and with the poets’ own voices. Below are the prescribed editions, recordings of both poets reading, and a short shelf of criticism you can reach for nothing. Every link here has been checked; they open in a new tab.
The collections
Field Work (Faber)
Heaney’s 1979 collection at its publisher. The prescribed edition is the one to read and take into the exam, clean and unannotated.
The textSkirrid Hill (Seren)
Sheers’s 2005 collection at Seren, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award. This is the prescribed edition.
Hear the poets read
Heaney at the Poetry Archive
Heaney reading his own work aloud. Hearing the voice behind the elegies changes how you read the line breaks.
ListenSheers at the Poetry Archive
Sheers reads ‘Mametz Wood’, ‘The Farrier’ and ‘The Hill Fort (Y Gaer)’ among others. Recorded in 2005, the year of the book.
Criticism you can read now
Joshua Weiner on ‘Casualty’
A close Poetry Foundation guide to the elegy, its Yeatsian form and its unnamed victim. A model of how to read one poem well.
CriticismChristopher Ricks on Field Work
Ricks’s early London Review of Books essay, ‘The Mouth, the Meal and the Book’, on trust, comedy and craft across the collection.
CriticismFaber on ‘Song’
A short Faber Journal reading of ‘Song’ and ‘the music of what happens’, useful on Heaney’s late-book lyrics.
On the class bookshelf
Two books stand behind much of the criticism on this site: Neil Corcoran’s study of Heaney and R. F. Foster’s On Seamus Heaney. For Sheers, Dr Catriona Coutts’s notes and Sarah Crown’s 2006 review shape the reading here. The English & Media Centre’s emagazine also carries strong pieces on both poets, though it needs a school subscription. Ask about these in class.