Station Island

Blurb

Station Island is the sixth collection of original poetry written by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. It is dedicated to the Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel. The collection was first published in the UK and Ireland in 1984 by Faber & Faber and was then published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1985. Seamus Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.
The title of the collection, Station Island, is taken from the long poem of the same name that comprises the second part of the collection. It refers to Station Island on Lough Derg in Co. Donegal, a site of Christian pilgrimage for many centuries. During his undergraduate years at Queen’s University Belfast, Heaney went on the pilgrimage several times.
The poems in the collection are generally focused on the role of the poet and their relationship to history and politics but, more specifically, are also a platform through which Heaney can examine his own complex relationship with the sectarian violence of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.