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\"Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish \"Troubles\" beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and map-the spirit region, that world beyond our ken. In Seamus Heaney's Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that Heaney's regions-the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one-offer the best entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaney's body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. As Russell shows, Heaney believed in the power of ideas-and the texts representing them-to begin resolving historical divisions. For Russell, Heaney's regionalist poetry contains a \"Hegelian synthesis\" view of history that imagines potential resolutions to the conflicts that have plagued Ireland and Northern Ireland for centuries. Drawing on extensive archival and primary material by the poet, Seamus Heaney's Regions examines Heaney's work from before his first published poetry volume, Death of a Naturalist in 1966, to his most recent volume, the elegiac Human Chain in 2010, to provide the most comprehensive treatment of the poet's work to date. \"Richard Rankin Russell's Seamus Heaney's Regions is a major and original contribution; it is hard to think of another critical work on Heaney that is so complete in its coverage, from the earliest activities to Human Chain. Russell is extremely well-versed in Heaney's writings, and extends his analysis beyond the usual concentration on the poetry to bring in the crucial prose and dramatic works, including the early, largely forgotten items. The breadth of his approach makes his book of interest to scholars in such neighboring fields as social geography, history, and theology as well as contemporary literature.\" -Bernard O'Donoghue, Wadham College, University of Oxford\"-- Provided by publisher.

This essay rereads Cormac McCarthy's 1979 novel Suttree as a \"blues,\" examining Suttree's deep relationship to the vengeful, hunted black man Ab Jones, whose scarred body and eloquently articulated narrative of persecution leads Suttree to channel his plaintive suffering. Startlingly, the conclusion of the novel, particularly the final image of the huntsman and hounds who the title character fears are chasing him, suggests that McCarthy draws on Delta bluesman Robert Johnson's most famous tune, \"Hellhound on My Trail,\" in his evocation of these hounds and Suttree's fear of them through his channeling the identity of Johnson (behind whom looms Ab Jones). At the same time, the hounds have figuratively embayed a particular Knoxville populace—its black community—with devastating consequences and the hounds' presence through this lyrical intertext at the end of the novel suggest how that community's inhabitants, particularly Ab, continue to be hunted down by the white community's representatives such as the police.

Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney's lives and careers have been intertwined since the 1960s, when they participated in the Belfast Group of creative writers and later edited the literary journal Northern Review. In Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland, Richard Rankin Russell explores Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination in the midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space, Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialog and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the Troubles. The first chapter examines the influence of the Belfast Group on Longley and Heaney's shared aesthetic of poetry. Successive chapters analyze major works of both poets. Russell offers close readings of poems in the context of the poets' cultural and political concerns for the province. He concludes by showing how thoroughly their poetic language has entered the cultural, educational, and political discourse of contemporary Northern Ireland as it pursues the process of peace.

This essay-review analyzes Kieran Quinlan's 2020 study, Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland (Catholic University Press of America), noting its tendency to conflate Catholicism north and south of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and its bias against recovering Christian images, ideas, and values in Heaney's poetry. Heaney's Northern Irish Catholicism became a persistent element in his poetry and continued to influence it until his death in 2013.

This study will enable readers to gain clearer understanding of the life and major works of Seamus Heaney. It considers literary influences on Heaney, ranging from English poets such as Wordsworth, Hughes, and Auden to Irish poets such as Kavanagh and Yeats to world poets such as Virgil and Dante.

Background Weight misperceptions are common in children and adolescents, which is related to the engagement of weight loss behaviors. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between body weight perception and weight loss behaviors of lower-calorie diets and increased levels of physical activity (PA). Methods The Ningbo Youth Risk Behavior Survey was conducted from 2007 to 2022. A multistage, stratified cluster sampling procedure was utilized to draw target adolescents aged 12 to 18 years participating in each survey wave (2007, 2012, 2017, 2022). Data of anthropometry, weight perception, and weight loss behaviors were collected through self-administered questionnaires. A binary generalized linear model was used to examine associations between body weight perception and weight loss behaviors of lower calorie diets and increased levels of PA. Results The sample sizes for each survey wave were 777, 885, 1588 and 2638. The prevalence of overweight (OW)/obesity (OB), self-perception of OW/OB and overestimated perception increased from 7.6%, 27.0% and 29.1% in 2007 to 16.3%, 39.9% and 41.4% in 2022, respectively. Adolescents that perceived themselves as OW/OB had higher odds of lower-calorie diets (OR: 4.2, 3.3–5.4) and increased level of PA (OR: 3.8, 2.9-5.0), whereas adolescents that perceived themselves as underweight had lower odds of lower-calorie diets (OR: 0.371, 0.253–0.542) and increased levels of PA (OR: 0.381, 0.295–0.559). Conclusion OW, self-perception of OW/OB and overestimated perception were prevalent in Chinese adolescents. Self-perception of OW/OB was positively associated with lower-calorie diets and increased levels of PA. The results can support public health specialists to promote health education of body perception and improve self-esteem in Chinese children and adolescents.

MICHAEL GORRA'S MOVING AND THOUGHTFUL STUDY, THE SADDEST Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020), will quickly become required reading for students seeking to understand the South, Faulkner, and the continuing divide in our country over race matters, particularly those involving the legacy of slavery. Faulkner knew slavery was wrong, sensed intuitively from an early age that Jim Crow was too; yet he struggled mightily with the advances of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s despite his profound explorations of black and mixed-race consciousness in the major novels, starting with The Sound and the Fury in 1929 and ending with the considerable achievement of Go Down, Moses (still, I think, his best novel, although some persist in reading it as a short story collection) in 1942. [...]Dark House\" explores Faulkner's conflicted attitudes toward race. [...]while the white southern churches had unfortunately long before \"made their peace with slavery,\" the black churches had not, and in that refusal—in their function as both a refuge for black Americans and their promise of a better day, on earth and in heaven—lies an untold story that offsets considerably the deterministic thrust of Gorra's thesis, one recently and profitably told in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s, book which became a PBS miniseries, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song.

Background Current human retina studies predominantly utilize post-mortem tissue, and the sample accessibility constraints make the characterization of the living human retina at single-cell resolution a challenge. Although single-nucleus RNA-seq expands the utility of frozen samples, it provides a nuclear-centric view, potentially missing key cytoplasmic information and transient biological processes. Thus, it is important to generate resources directly from living human retinal tissue to complement existing datasets. Methods We profiled 106,829 single cells from nine unfrozen human retina samples. Living samples were collected within 10 min of therapeutic enucleation and four postmortem samples were collected within 6 h. After standardized dissociation, single-cell transcriptomes were generated using 10x Genomics 3’ RNA-seq and applied scVI to generate batch-corrected integrated atlas. Major cell types and subtypes were annotated through iterative Leiden clustering, canonical markers. Subsequent analyses included differential expression comparisons between cell states and regulon activity profiling to further characterize cellular identities and regulatory networks. Transcriptional dynamics were assessed using RNA velocity, and cell-cell signaling pathways were inferred with CellChat. Key findings were validated in independent samples from two additional donors (four samples) using the identical workflow. Results We contribute to establishing a reference for retinal cell type proportions and cellular states. Our analysis revealed ELF1-mlCone, a distinct cluster of mlCone photoreceptors identified by distinct transcriptional features. The presence and transcriptional features of this cluster were validated in independent samples. Additionally, by comparing living and post-mortem samples, our study highlights differences in transcriptional dynamics: living tissue preserved coherent RNA velocity streams, enabling clear dynamic state transitions, while post-mortem tissue exhibited disorganized patterns. These findings suggest that using living tissue can improve the capture of active cellular states and transitions. Conclusions Our atlas provides a single-cell reference contrasting living versus early postmortem human retina, integrating cell type composition, transcriptional diversity, and functional insights. It may serve as a useful resource for retinal research and for understanding aspects of human retinal biology, particularly given its inclusion of living tissue and diverse pathological states.