A trove of unpublished poems by the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney is set to be printed alongside his collected and uncollected poems, published together for the first time.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney will feature his 12 collections interspersed with poems published in magazines, journals and newspapers, plus 25 poems selected from Heaney’s large number of unpublished works.

The unearthed poems include Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar – published for the first time below – which Heaney wrote for the wedding of one of his sons, Christopher, in July 2004. Many of the unpublished poems are housed in the National Library of Ireland (NLI), where the poet bequeathed his literary papers before his death in 2013.

Whether or not they should be published was an “absolutely core question”, said Matthew Hollis, a poet and a long-term editor of Heaney, who worked with the poet’s family and fellow editors Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue over the last decade to put together the collection, published by Faber this Thursday. “If an author chose not to publish a poem, does anyone else have the right to do so?”

However, given that Heaney had passed the poems to the NLI, “we didn’t get a sense that he wished them to remain private”, said Hollis. Some of the poems they looked at had not reached a state of completion that “perhaps Seamus himself would have been satisfied” with, which is why he may have set them aside. The chosen unpublished poems are included in the appendix, so as to separate them from the works published in Heaney’s lifetime. The book also features a commentary by the editors, which “situates” the poems.

Reading his 12 collections together, there is a “clear sense of moving between subjects and periods”, said Hollis. The first four have a “common project in the ground and in the bog metaphor”, which he used to write about Ireland’s history and the Troubles; there is then a “middle period” focused on domestic life and fatherhood; and finally a later period in which he “seems to face out and addresses worldly subjects”, including 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings.

Fitting into that middle period is Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar, an epithalamium – or wedding poem – written for Christopher. Across three stanzas, Heaney writes about his small son rocking in a chair, a pocket knife he bought for him in France, and the guitar he got the day he started school, which speaks to Christopher’s musical career, his “deep and lasting passion”, said Hollis. Each of the three objects are symbols “of sharing a moment in which the two of them are simply just there together”.

Unlike other unpublished poems, some of which had tens of pages of drafts, there seems to be just one version of Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar in existence. Heaney may have had more focus writing the poem because it was for an occasion, said Hollis. “It seems to have arrived with confidence, with force, and with purity of heart.”

Putting together the collection, Hollis was struck by “quite how hardworking Seamus Heaney was”. When writers reach a reputation so “internationally profound”, there can be “an assumption that somehow it’s easy for them, or that they simply have a supreme gift that the rest of us don’t have.”

But Heaney’s many drafts make clear “how many avenues he would turn up and then turn back having not reached the right place”, said Hollis. He had a busy life as a lecturer and father, and “quite a number” of drafts are time-stamped “three o’clock in the morning”. Some poems would take years to arrive in their final form. “Even knowledgable readers may be surprised at the depth and the vigour with which Seamus would work in order to bring the latent poem to the surface.”

Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar

The slatted folding chair you sat upon,
The scantlings and ad hoc stuff of that playroom
You screened out as you just rocked on and on
In perfect time before the television,
To-day let all that tick-tock bric-a-brac
Come like a drumstick stick-man rolling home.

The one-blade pocket knife you coveted
In a shop window that first evening in France
And I bought then on the spot in thanksgiving
For us just being there: although it’s lost
I stand like a glad Macbeth faced with its ghost
Handle towards my hand, saying, ‘Thank, thank God’.

The guitar you got the day you started school
And were photographed with, up on the picnic table,
Play it again to-day, fierce Andalucian
Serenades and country wedding songs,
Then hang it on the wall, your true love’s token,
Last thing before she sleeps, first when you waken.

• Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar is an unpublished poem by Seamus Heaney extracted from The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis, to be published by Faber & Faber on 9 October 2025 (£40). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.