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Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996

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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.

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.

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.

Heaney is clearly one of the most important literary figures in the world. He is perhaps even the most important writer from Great Britain since Yeats. It's nice to know that an Irishman who speaks for all citizens of the world has been most deservedly honored with a Nobel Prize.

Heaney is a word-smith. For example, "The Forge" is a sonnet that embraces the scope of poetic creativity and power: "All I know is a door into the dark...."

Heaney's work is uncompromising and unparalleled in its depth. It can be justly compared to Milosz, or even a Yeats. Heaney is introspective, careful, and most importantly, sincere. Every word on the page counts; every word reverberates and shimmers with life, death, and modest negotations with an often hostile political landscape. His poetic vision is transcendental.

This anthology includes Heaney's Nobel Prize Speech: "Crediting Poetry," which is incredibly beautiful and thought-provoking. Some of my favorite poetic images are included here, involving blackberries, frogs, funerals, marital meditations, early morning military manuevers, potato peeling, and a mother ironing....

I highly recommend this anthology. It is beautiful and exciting; Heaney's verse will raise the hair on the back of your neck, as well as electrify your soul.

I have waited several years for a single volume edition of Heaney's poetry-this is it! Contains 150 poems,several prose pieces and concludes with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech 'Crediting Poetry'. An excellent collection.

Seamus Heaney writes of the Ireland he knows. There are poems of bogs where he digs in with his pen, such as the image of "The Tollund Man" found dead in the bog, or Strange Fruit with "Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings". There are Irish scenes of the lough (lakes) and the corncrake. The poems span 30 years, and the British-Irish fighting in the 1970's is reflected in some sad memories. These poems have a universal appeal and in his included Nobel lecture he states, "I have already begun a journey into the wideness of the world". I would agree with one reviewer who notes a medieval tone and there is a certain solemnity: "Read poems as prayers", he states in the longer poem Station Island. You can hear him read some of these poems in the audiotape "Stepping Stones."

Nabokov said the pleasures of reading literature can be sensed in the raising of the hairs on the spine, and there are spine tingling thrills aplenty in this ample collection of Heaney's poems.

Within are his early nature poems evoking the earthy rural Irish country 'Digging', 'Death of a Naturalist', through to his political poems, his saga poems, his love poems, his epic translations.

The language swoops effortlessly from the journalistic to the mythological. Just a taste here:

'To every cocked ear, expert in its greed/his battered signature subscribes 'No Pope'./The goatskin's sometimes plastered with his blood./The air is pounding like a stethoscope. (Heaney here drawing on his mastery of language in sectarian fashion to portray the Orange marhcers as hideous, pulsing creatures in 'Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966)

And the nature side 'The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge.' (From 'Digging', Heaney's pean to the pen over the shovel)

And the Miltonic epic style: 'I returned to a long strand/the hammered curve of a bay,/and found only the secular/powers of the Atlantic thundering.

Truly Heaney has a gift for the taste, texture, heft and sound of words.

One of the most remarkable things about Seamus Heaney is his "Shadow Gaelic"...or his use of gaelic verse structure and rhyme in the english language. He is a master manipulator of words and he brings the Irish mentality fully into the 20th century. He is both interesting as a poet in its own right and as a figure in Irish literature, his work is moving, compelling and speaks directly to the soul. I highly reccomend any of his work, and this compilation is a nice over-view of the 30 years of his carreer up to the mid-nineties.

Seamus Heaney's collection _Opened_Ground_ is a rambling jaunt through 30 years of his best-loved works. Many well-known poems are found throughout along with several soon-to-be favorites. This volume also contains his Nobel lecture, "Crediting Poetry," a must read for poets, poetry-lovers, or the just plain literate. Seamus Heaney is a poet of universal voice and local concern.

Dazzling and intense works. Good overview of his output. Although this is not the Collected Poetry of Heaney it does contain almost all his best poems up to 1996, as well as his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture (a gem) and an excerpt from his play Cure a Troy. Heaney is a very special poet, similar in my mind to Yeats and Dylan Thomas, with a Zen Buddhist twist - an underground clearly visible through the influences of the Chinese poet Han Shan "Cold Mountain". For the poems which have exerted an influence on Heaney see: Cold Mountain: Poetry of Han-Shan: A Complete Annotated Translation of Cold Mountain (SUNY Series in Buddhist Studies) Open Ground is an essential contemporary poetry volume. Like Zen poetry Heaney is often very simple, linear, and descriptive on the surface yet with lots of intertwining symbolism, language play and richness working to create a poetic reality true to external reality yet ripping open to a more profound reality in his attempt to "stabilize truth" as Ben Johnson has said. He is also often times very oblique in his simplicity - a challenge to any poetic mind. He is a modern classic. The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition)