Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 [Hardcover]

Seamus Heaney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 1998

As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For Seamus Heaney, "opened ground" is a necessity--a way of getting to the root of things. The book bearing that name spans three decades, beginning with "Digging," his exhilarating portrait of the artist as a young revolutionary. "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun," Heaney boasts (although by the end of the poem, his weapon has metamorphosed into something closer to the spade his grandfather and father once relied upon). The last entry, the sonnet "Postscript," appears some 400 pages later, which makes Opened Ground a capacious selection of his work. But at this point Heaney requires the largest of hold-alls. There are beautiful, pastoral lyrics here, sequences such as "Glanmore Sonnets" and "Clearances," and a multitude of love poems, not solely to his wife but to his parents and children. And in Heaney's hands, small domestic moments and objects--a scrabble board, a swing, a kite, a bed sawn in half to get it downstairs--invariably become both reality and soaring myth.

At the same time, his Ireland is the site of "neighborly murders," and the past and larger world he confronts is one threatened by history and brutal sectarianism. Heaney has declared, "Fear is the emotion that the muse thrives on. That's always there"--and terror is pervasive in his "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, / Of open minds as open as a trap." Many of his poems that explore the Troubles reflect his own considerable concern that he has long "confused evasion and artistic tact." Others might be termed self-reflexive, since Heaney uses them to unearth his own role. "Kinship" features a simple, brilliant (not to mention canine!) simile:

I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat.

In a later poem, "From the Frontier of Writing," he compares the struggle for inspiration to being stopped at a roadblock: "And everything is pure interrogation / until a rifle motions you and you move / with guarded unconcerned acceleration." Heaney's gift is dazzling, and would be almost unbearable were it not matched by vigilance, self-doubt, and regret--and his longing for the day in which "justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme." --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly

For those few readers of poetry unfamiliar with the Nobel laureate's work, and for others who wish for up-to-date representative samplings from a prolific career, this new volume from Heaney will be just the ticket, perhaps the poetry stocking-stuffer of the year. Although we already have a selected from Heaney, running through 1987, and nearly all of his previous 12 books of poems are in print (including an even earlier selected), the post-'87 material collected here is very generous: most of 1996's Spirit Level, as well as Heaney's Nobel Lecture. Looking at the entire arc of his work, one is reminded of the heavy lifting in the earlier books Death of a Naturalist, Wintering Out and North, in which Heaney struggles heroically to find purchase as a poet in a minefield of sectarian contentions. As Heaney finds his voice, that peculiarly wistful and earthy mixture of rural reverie and high public speech (Kavanagh meets Yeats), his interests broaden, and in the middle and later volumes the poet seeks out Greek myths, Irish epics and Scandinavian digs, looking for correlatives apt to his meditations. Throughout, the visceral impact of Heaney's speech is his signature-"All year the flax-dam festered in the heart/ Of the townland; green and heavy-headed/ Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods"-and not written to be tromped through speedily. Better, then, to take short walks in Opened Ground. Although it is not a critically important time for this compilation to appear, the effort to keep the shape of Heaney's continuing body of work in view is a worthy one. He is a major figure, working at full-bore still.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (November 9, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374235171
• ISBN-13: 978-0374235178
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #176,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marvellous collection, February 25, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Lexington, Kentucky) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (Hardcover)

Those of you who are already familiar with his poems will be delighted to learn of the publication of Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, a bumper crop of Heaney's best work over a thirty year period, and a record of the writer's development from the tentative and introspective poems of Death of a Naturalist (1966) to the authoritative and visionary tonalities of middle age in Seeing Things (1991) and The Spirit Level (1996).

This hefty, 440-page volume gathers together a pruned-down version of each of the author's ten volumes of poetry, plus extracts from his verse play, The Cure at Troy, his translation of the Irish epic poem, Sweeney Astray, and his Nobel Prize lecture, "Crediting Poetry." In 1975, poet Robert Lowell dubbed Heaney "the greatest Irish poet since W.B.Yeats." This volume proves that claim, perhaps too hasty a judgement in 1975, to be fully justified.

One of the most appealing aspects of the early poetry is the dense, tactile language used to evoke scenes of nature on the family farm, often conveyed from the point of view of the small child, and the poems are full of a child's freshness of perception. Farmyard and barnyard, cows, bulls, rats, sheds, wells, rakes, ploughs, and pitchforks appeared in vivid detail in this rural poetic landscape, in which the speaker experienced his solitary epiphanies. Farm workers and rural artisans, including thatchers, ploughmen and even water diviners were transformed into artists in their own right, and as alter egos of the poet himself

In the 1970s, Heaney began to write more directly about the Irish landscape, particularly the marshy bogs, that became emblematic for him of the Irish national consciousness. Heaney imagined the bogland that contained ancient artifacts, bones, skeletons and preserved corpses as dark and magical repositories of the nation's memory, including its memory of violence and bloodshed. In North (1975) he published a series of memorable and moving "bog poems" that explored the parallels between bronze age human sacrifice in ancient Denmark and the killings in Northern Ireland at the time of writing. It is with this book that Heaney became known as the poet of the Northern Irish Troubles. In comparing ancient, pagan cultures with the murderous climate of Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, he conveyed a bleak portrait of a province locked in an ancient conflict that was doomed to continue indefinitely. The next book, Field Work (1979) was notable for its many fine elegies, including several poignant elegies for friends and relations murdered in the Troubles. But this was also a book of blessings, including poems of pastoral peace, and marriage poems set in county Wicklow where Heaney had moved. One of Heaney's dominant strains is the elegiac, and he has continued to produce a fine sequence of elegies for his mother, "Clearances," in The Haw Lantern (1987) and for his father in Seeing Things (1991).

Seamus Heaney is widely admired for his sensuous evocation of a farmyard childhood in Northern Ireland in the 1940s, for his thoughtful and moving approach to the Northern Irish Troubles, conveying the perspectives of nationalist Roman Catholic culture, while avoiding didacticism and outright partisanship, for his fine elegies in which he registers the personal loss of those who were dear to him, and for his more recent, celebratory and visionary poetry. But the main point about him, as with all great poets, is not his subject matter, but the fact that he has enormous linguistic resources, hence the power to convey his experiences freshly and convincingly.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heaney's Natural, Witty, Brilliant Poems In One Volume., April 18, 2000

By 

Patrick McCormack (New Brighton, MN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (Hardcover)

Seamus Heaney is a master poet who connects nature, emotion, and even plot, in a brilliant and particularly Irish poetry. These poems are accessible to non-English majors. I read them out loud to my wife at night. They elicit a reaction that begins at emotional imagery, veers into thought, and ends up touching your soul. One of the immortal greats of the English language is writing and publishing now, and this book is indispensable.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best living English-language poet, April 12, 2001

By 

Josh Chafetz (New Haven, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (Paperback)

Opened Ground is an excellent introduction to Heaney's poetry, taking the reader from his earliest expressions of anxiety over his chosen profession ("Digging" and "Poem") to his love for his native Ireland ("Annahorish" and "Broagh") and his anxiety over the political fate of his country ("Casualty" and "The Toome Road") to reflections on mortality in general (and therefore, naturally, on his own) ("An Afterwards" and "Squarings"). Of course, to claim that any of his poems are "about" any one thing is to perform an almost unpardonable act of reductionism -- they all take in a great breadth and depth of experiences and wisdom. While it is true that "An Afterwards" is in some sense about death, it is equally about poetry and the Faustian bargain poets sometimes must make, leaving family behind in the pursuit of beauty. This anxiety, too, recurrs throughout Heaney's work. To anyone who is even remotely interested in modern poetry, this is a great introduction to a great poet, and it belongs on your shelf.