Stations is a collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...

, published in 1975.

This particular collection presents a style of writing which was then new to Heaney, known as "verse paragraphs" or prose poems. He believed this style of poetry was his own invention, but halfway through writing the collection, while teaching in an American university in 1971, English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 poet, Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation...

published a collection of poetry called "Mercian Hymns", which were presented in this style of "prose poems".

In Heaney's own words "What I had regarded as stolen marches in a form new to me, had been headed off by a work of complete authority,"

However upon his return to Ireland, Heaney completed and published Stations in 1975. Among the collection are poems such as "Nesting Grounds", "England's Difficulty" and "Cloistered," which return to Heaney's childhood, although the difference between these and earlier poems being that while previously they were written with a child's eye view, now many of these poems where written from an adult's perspective of their childhood self, particularly "Nesting Ground," which shows a more cautious side to Heaney's childhood.