Atfield, Joy Rosemary

Dr. Joy Rosemary Atfield teaches at Brunel University and the Central School of Ballet. She received bother he M.A. and D.Phil. from Sussex Univeristy. Dr. Atfield has established undergraduate and post graduate creative writing courses at Brunel and is course convenor of the popular M.A. in Creative and Transactional Writing. She has published on other contemporary Irish poets, such as Boland, McGuckian and Dorcey.

A Jungian Reading of Selected Poems of Seamus Heaney

2007 0-7734-5391-1
This book is a study of the poetry of Seamus Heaney collected in his volume Opened Ground, in which the poems are read in Jungian terms. Heaney had referred to himself as “Jungian in religion” and naturally used terms such as “initiation”, “individuation” and the “unconscious” in interviews and essays. Therefore, key Jungian terms are examined in relation to Heaney’s poetic expression of these and explored through at least one poem from each of the collections represented in Opened Ground. This allows for an exploration of the creative tensions involved in the poet’s presentation of personal, poetic and political concerns, while also allowing for further examination of the powerful physicality and musical qualities of the language in which he luxuriates.