This book contains a greater number of poems than would usually appear in a Selected Poems, fewer than would make up a Collected: it belongs somewhere between the two categories.
I have taken the opportunity to include a very few poems not printed in previous volumes and made a short sequence of extracts from The Cure at Troy (1990), my version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. In similar fashion, 'Sweeney In Flight' is made up of sections from Sweeney Astray (1983), a translation of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne, which tells of the penitential life led by Sweeney after he was cursed and turned into a wild flying creature by St Ronan at the Battle of Moira.
Stations was published as a pamphlet by Ulsterman Publications in 1975. The first pieces were written in Berkeley in 1970.
'Station Island' is a sequence of dream encounters set on an island in Co. Donegal where, since medieval times, pilgrims have gone to perform the prescribed penitential exercises (or 'stations').
'Villanelle for an Anniversary' was written to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College in 1636. 'Alphabets' was the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1984.
I have included 'Crediting Poetry' as an Afterword. This seemed to make sense, since the ground covered in the lecture is ground originally opened by the poems which here precede it.
S.H.
Poems 1966–1996
