Station Island. London: Faber, 1984. Pp, 123. First Edition. A fine bright copy in dust jacket.

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.