Three Stanzas: Miroslaw Balka/Robert Gober/Seamus Heaney

by Seamus Heaney, Patrick Murphy (Afterword), Miroslaw Balka (Painter)

This book documents an important exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. An unusual wedding of art and poetry, and a meditation on memory and loss, the book's focal point is a poem by Irish poet and 1995 Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. In thematic con with Heaney's poem are grouped by two renowned sculptors, Miroslaw Balka (b.1958) and Robert Gober (b.1954). Balka's work utilizes the proportions of his own body, and the geometry of his childhood home in Warsaw. He often uses ash or felt in his tracing of memory, while Gober combines objects such as sinks, beds and doors -- as well as mannequins -- to reflect on the fragmentary nature of experience. This book proposes a unity between these artists.

31 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1999

About the author

Works of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections Wintering Out (1972) and Field Work (1979) as well as a translation of Beowulf (1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney on Wikipedia.