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Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats.

Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's body of work up to Seeing Things and The Spirit Level. It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations.

According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of "the center," a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright Page
  2. pp. i-vi
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. ix-x
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  1. Introduction: One of the Venerators
  2. pp. 1-13
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  1. List of Abbreviations
  2. p. 14
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  1. 1. Senses of Place: Death of a Naturalist
  2. pp. 15-38
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  1. 2. Almost Unnameable Energies: Door into the Dark
  2. pp. 39-67
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  1. 3. A Poetry of Geographical Imagination: Wintering Out
  2. pp. 68-102
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  1. 4. Cooped Secrets of Process and Ritual: North
  2. pp. 103-141
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  1. 5. Door into the Light: Field Work
  2. pp. 142-174
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  1. 6. A Poet's Rite of Passage: Station Island
  2. pp. 175-215
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  1. 7. Unwriting Place: The Haw Lantern
  2. pp. 216-247
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  1. 8. Parables of Perfected Vision: Seeing Things
  2. pp. 248-274
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  1. 9. Things Apparent and Transparent: The Spirit Level
  2. pp. 275-292
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  1. Afterword
  2. pp. 293-304
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 305-318
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  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 319-328
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 329-338
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