Best books . . . chosen by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize–winning Irish poet, chooses a book from each of his six decades, beginning with the 1940s. Heaney’s latest book of poetry is District and Circle.

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (Scholastic, $4) One of the first books I owned, brought by Santa Claus. The story of David Balfour’s adventures after he “took the key from his father’s house for the last time” still entrances.

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (Dover, $4) Lawrence’s early masterpiece overwhelmed me in my late teens: the novel as a book of life, an introduction to the son and lover in oneself and an interrogation of them.

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Lupercal by Ted Hughes (out of print) When I took it off the shelf in a public library at the age of 23, I came alive to poetry and my experience came alive to me as if I were a battery being charged.

The Bog People by P.V. Glob (New York Review, $17) Glob was an archaeologist with the imagination of a poet. In this account of bodies found in the bogs of northern Europe, the dead walk out of their museums into the mystery of their Iron Age lives and sacrificial deaths. My Christmas present to myself in 1969.

Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam (Modern Library, $23) One of the greatest books about the vocation of poetry: a fierce computing of what it cost the author and her husband, the doomed Osip Mandelstam, to maintain “inner freedom” in the terror world of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Dantesque in its readiness to mete out punishment and praise.

New and Collected Poems by Czeslaw

Milosz (Ecco, $20) Lithuanian-born, Polish speaking, orchestral in his language, stretched—as he once said—“between politics and transcendence,” Milosz was one of the great poets of the 20th century.

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell (Vintage, $13) This was my first encounter with Mankell’s faintly depressive fast-foodie detective, Kurt Wallander. I went immediately on a binge read.