Annal:1987 Whitbread Book Award for Poetry

The Haw Lantern

Seamus Heaney

• 1987 Whitbread-Poetry winner
• Score: 10.37

Seamus Heaney describes the haw lantern as “small light for small people” but there is more than tiny illumination emanating from one of Ireland’s premier poets. Heaney peppers this short collection of poems with crafty language and natural objects: “I heard the hatchet’s differentiated/Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh/And collapse of what luxuriated/Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.”