Medievalbookshop — ACG0089 Sweeney Astray

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Scanned image of the book’s front cover

Seamus Heaney.
Sweeney Astray.
Published London: Faber & Faber, revised reissue 2001 (previous edition was 1983).
ISBN 0571210090;
ISBN-13 9780571210091.
Binding: paperback, stitch bound.
Size: 129×197mm.
Page count: ix,75pp.
Main language: English.
Overall condition good to very good: this copy has the usual wear on its covers, especially on the edges and corners, noticeable but not severe; pages starting to yellow a little with age; text appears to be free of marking.

This item £6.00
P&P inc. within the UK
(delivery outside the UK not currently available)

[Publisher’s price £10.99]
Weight without packaging: 128g.

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Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney’s version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a demented flying creature at the Battle of Moira.

Heaney worked on this translation when he moved in the early 1970s to the Wicklow countryside, and managed to embody ‘the green spirit of the hedges’ in the poetry spoken by the outcast poet-king. And yet, as Heaney writes in his introduction, there were other topographical connections that linked him to the Sweeney figure so that ‘one way or the other he seemed to have been with me from the start’.

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