Station Island. London: Faber, 1984. Pp, 123. First Edition. Light foxing to endpapers, otherwise a nice bright copy in dust jacket.

Signed by Seamus Heaney on the title page.

Heaney’s first new collection of poems since ‘Field Work’ (1979), is set on an island (Lough Derg in Co Donegal) which has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years.

The title sequence is a modern Purgatorio, structured around the traditional Irish Catholic pilgrimage to Lough Derg (Station Island). Heaney uses the framework of a three-day penitential journey to stage encounters with ghosts from his personal and literary past. This allows the poem to become a profound act of self-reckoning—a dialogue with the dead that interrogates the poet’s role in a divided society.