This book offers an examination of Seamus Heaney's poetic volume, Opened Ground, placing it into dialogue with the major themes, terms and ideas of Jungian psychology. This work should appeal to scholars interested in Jungian psychology, Jungian readings of literature, and Irish poetry. Opened Ground, in which the poems are read in Jungian terms. Heaney had referred to himself as Jungian in religion and naturally used terms such as initiation, individuation and the unconscious in interviews and essays. Therefore, key Jungian terms are examined in relation to Heaney's poetic expression of these and explored through at least one poem from each of the collections represented in Opened Ground. This allows for an exploration of the creative tensions involved in the poet's presentation of personal, poetic and political concerns, while also allowing for further examination of the powerful physicality and musical qualities of the language in which he luxuriates.

Poetry and Voice, with a foreword by Helen Dunmore, is a book of essays which fuses critical and creative treatments of poetic voice. Some contributors focus on critical explorations of voice in work by poets such as John Ashbery, Simon Armitage, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Arun Kolatkar, Don McKay and Dragica Rajčić, and on the musical voices of the lyric tradition and of poetry itself. Vicki Feaver, Jane Griffiths, Philip Gross, Waqas Khwaja, Lesley Saunders and David Swann reflect on their own poetic processes of composition, and the development of the voices of childhood, old age, migration, landscape, bilinguality, and imprisonment. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Tatjana Bijelić examine the nature of poetic voice in exile, the need for fresh voices after war and new spaces in which poetic voices can be heard. In this international collection, the contributors give rare and generous insights into inner poetic processes and external effects. They engage with artistic debates about developing, losing and appropriating voice in poetry and approach the question of what is ‘finding a voice’ in poetry from multiple angles. The book will interest literary critics, poets, lecturers, and undergraduate and postgraduate students of literature, poetry and creative writing.

Seamus Heaney's prose poetics return repeatedly to the adequacy of poetry, its ameliorative, restorative response to the violence of public historical life. It is a curiously equivocal ideal, and as such most clearly demonstrates the intellectual origins, the humanist character, and the inherent strains of these poetics, the work of one of the world's leading poet-critics of the last thirty years. Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry is the first study of the development of Heaney's thought and its central theme. Eschewing the tendency of Heaney critics to endorse or expand on the poet's poetics in largely adulatory terms, it draws on archival as well as print sources to trace the emerging dualistic shape, redemptive logic, and post-Christian nature of Heaney's thought, from his undergraduate formation to the expansive affirmations of his late cultural poetics. Through a meticulous and wholly new examination of Heaney's revisions to previously published prose, it reveals the logical strain of his conceptual constructions, so that it becomes acutely apparent just how appropriate that ambivalent ideal 'adequacy' is. This book takes seriously the post-Christian, frequently religious tenor of Heaney's language, explicating the character of his thought while exposing its limits: Heaney's belief in poetry's adequacy ultimately constitutes an Arnoldian substitute for—indeed, an 'afterimage' of—Christian belief. This is the deep significance of the idea of adequacy to Heaney's thought: it allows us to identify precisely the late humanist character and the limits of his troubled trust in poetry.

Language has a primary importance in Jungian psychology and its practice. C. G. Jung saw every act of speech as a psychic event. Even the "worker" words in language, like prepositions or conjunctions, carry particular archetypal energies, working dynamically and daimonically in the conduct of transformational narrative and realizing both personal and collective purposes. This book aims to deepen our consciousness of psyche’s speech as it occurs in our professional discourses, in the psychoanalytic encounter, in dreams, fairy tales, myths and poetry. Vividly exploring the grammar of psyche, we are urged to constantly kindle and rekindle our engagement with language.

A journal of Irish studies.

An up-to-date overview of Heaney's career thus far, with detailed readings of all his major publications.

This book raises questions around pedagogy and illness. Morris explores two large issues that run through the text. What does the ill body teach? What does the teacher do through the ill body?

A sanctuary for the soul—In The Rabbi, the Goddess, and Jung, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky shows us how to create a sacred space by cultivating one’s inner life. Admitting that this is not an easy practice in our hectic, fearful times, she demonstrates how the word from within orients—whether it comes as gift or disturbance, guest or ghost, riddle or revelation. It may force a confrontation with one’s worst fears. It may visit in nightmare images, such as the enormous spider with hairy legs and eight baleful eyes that appeared in a dream, come to warn, it would seem, of the perils facing human nature and Mother Nature. It is essential, especially in difficult times, to make space for what the Kabbalah calls “the beyond that lies within”—the still small voice of the Self, the long view of the wisdom traditions. In this collection of poetic, visionary essays, Lowinsky tells stories of the Lady Tree who showed up when she was six, and has wandered in and out of her life, revealing her Goddess nature. Active imagination enables her to work out unfinished business with ancestors including her father and Jung. Dreams introduce her to her spirit guides, and to a dancing rabbi who insists she study Kabbalah. And that scary spider turns out to be Grandmother Spider, a creator goddess who has the power, if we recognize Her, to help us reweave our relationship with earth.

Annie Morrison, creator of the Morrison Bone Prop, abandons the notion that language and thought are mainly processed in the left cerebral hemisphere, and coaches the actor to speak from the heart. Through this method, words acquire physical properties, such as weight, texture, colour and kinetic force. Think about Martin Luther King, Mao Zedong or Malala Yousafzai; potent speech impacts external events. And internally, it forms and shapes the world of the speaker. Seeing articulation as a purely mechanical skill is detrimental to an actor's process: it is crucial to understand what language is doing on a biological level. This workbook is invaluable for actors, both professional and in training, and also for voice and speech teachers.

A Study Guide for Ted Hughes's "Relic", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.