The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney's Prose is the first collection of essays solely focused on examining the Nobel prize winning poet's prose.

Ian Hickey has worked as a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College. His first monograph Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry was published by Routledge in 2021 and was a joint winner of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize. He also co-edited, alongside Ellen Howley, Seamus Heaney's Mythmaking published by Routledge in 2023. He has published numerous journal articles on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Brendan Behan and 21st century Irish writing, as well as on Benjamin Zephaniah in Spoken Word in the UK. He is currently writing his second monograph entitled Fragmentation: Twenty-First Century Irish Poetry and Fiction.

Eugene O'Brien is a professor of English Literature and Theory and head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College. He is also the director of the Mary Immaculate Institute for Irish Studies. He is the editor of the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory (Oxford Online Bibliographies: Literary and Cultural Theory) and of the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature). He has published a number of books on Seamus Heaney including: Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker: A Study of the Prose (Syracuse University Press); The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University of Notre Dame Press); Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind, Studies on Contemporary Ireland Series (Liffey Press); Seamus Heaney Searches for Answers (Pluto Press) and Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (University Press of Florida). His latest book is Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O'Carroll-Kelly (Routledge 2023); and he is working on a monograph of Micheal O'Siadhail (Routledge) and A Companion to 21st Century Irish Writing (with Anne Fogarty) (Routledge).

Introduction: Coming to Poetic Terms with Himself and Others

Ian Hickey and Eugene O'Brien

'Things founded clean on their own shapes': Seamus Heaney and the Shape of Poetry

Eugene O'Brien

Chapter 2: Seamus Heaney's Uncanny Encounters

Henry Hart

Chapter 3: Double Agent: The Redress of Seamus Heaney's Prose Poems

William Fogarty

Chapter 4: Preoccupied with Redress: Heaney Meditates on Getting his 'Feel into Words'

Ruth Macklin

Chapter 5: 'The Makings of a Music': Musicality and Seamus Heaney's Prose

Ian Hickey

Chapter 6: The Limits of Redress: Heaney's Aesthetics of Grace Confronts Larkin's Struggle with Gravity

Magdalena Kay

Chapter 7: Different Animals: Heaney's Public and Poetic Ted Hughes

Caoimhe Higgins

Chapter 8: 'Moving in step': Seamus Heaney on Patrick Kavanagh

Gary Wade

Chapter 9: 'The Push of the Whole Man': Heaney on Robert Lowell

Meg Tyler

Chapter 10: Seamus Heaney's Wordsworthian Prose Assessments of Brian Friel's Drama

Richard Rankin Russell