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."


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.


From Library Journal
If you can't afford all 12 of Nobel Laureate Heaney's previous works, here is a selection spanning 30 years. Heaney stays close to the ground in his measured, meditative poems, reveling in the everydayAbut since the everyday in Ireland can mean sectarian violence, there's a dark edge, too.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Edward Mendelson
[Opened Ground] eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today.


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
[Opened Ground] leaves us with a renewed appreciation of Heaney's own art, an art, in Heaney's own words, that makes space "for the marvelous as well as for the murderous," an art that commemorates the endurance of the private in the face of history and public grief.


Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
Art as the wizardry of style, on the one hand, and art as the personal and public expression, on the other. Not many can fuse the two nowadays, and no one writing in English does so well as Heaney.


Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Eschewing ideology and 'the diamond absolutes' of partisans on both sides in Northern Ireland, Mr. Heaney has created a remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' while at the same time remaining 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being'


Review
"[This collection] eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today."--Edward Mendelson, The New York Times Book Review

"Perhaps the best descriptions of Seamus Heaney's extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre come from the poet's own work. Mr. Heaney has created a remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' while at the same time remaining 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being.'"--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Having just reread most of his poems, I find myself more, not less, interested, and convinced that I have only begun to plumb their bracing depths . . . The poems stay in the mind, which is the one essential feature of major poetry."--Jay Parini, The Nation

"Heaney's commitment to the independence of his art, to the pursuit of shape and richness and abundant ambiguity, is also a profound commitment to the quality of public life . . . In a dark time, Heaney . . . has turned borders and dividing lines into rich frontiers."--Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books



Review
"[This collection] eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today."--Edward Mendelson, The New York Times Book Review

"Perhaps the best descriptions of Seamus Heaney's extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre come from the poet's own work. Mr. Heaney has created a remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' while at the same time remaining 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being.'"--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Having just reread most of his poems, I find myself more, not less, interested, and convinced that I have only begun to plumb their bracing depths . . . The poems stay in the mind, which is the one essential feature of major poetry."--Jay Parini, The Nation

"Heaney's commitment to the independence of his art, to the pursuit of shape and richness and abundant ambiguity, is also a profound commitment to the quality of public life . . . In a dark time, Heaney . . . has turned borders and dividing lines into rich frontiers."--Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books



Book Description
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."



About the Author
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in Northern Ireland. His award-winning books of poetry include The Haw Lantern (FSG, 1987), Seeing Things (FSG, 1991), and The Spirit Level (FSG, 1996). A resident of Dublin, he has taught at Oxford and Harvard.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A definitive choice of the Nobel Laureate's best poems.

You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. -from "Postscript" Noted for its concreteness and musicality, Seamus Heaney's poetry is internationally acclaimed for its ability to unite the ethical and the aesthetic, the matter-of-fact and the marvelous. This volume gathers the landmark poems from Heaney's twelve previous collections, and brings the reader up to date with the work Heaney has published since 1987. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

FROM THE CRITICS

Edward Mendelson - The New York Times Book Review

The ground opened by his pen...is dense with the bodies of the ancient and recent dead, and the emptiness left by his digging is filled with glowing visionary memories....a collection with a satisfying heft and more than enough variety of subject and style...

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

...[A] remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' ...[and remain] 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being'....[his] art, in Mr. Heaney's own words....'commemorates the endurance of the private in the face of history and public grief.'

Library Journal

If you can't afford all 12 of Nobel Laureate Heaney's previous works, here is a selection spanning 30 years. Heaney stays close to the ground in his measured, meditative poems, reveling in the everyday — but since the everyday in Ireland can mean sectarian violence, there's a dark edge, too.

John Kerrigan - London Review of Books

...[A] grand new retrospective volume....Fuller than a selected poems yet more abstemious than a collected, Opened Ground presents Heaney's dialogue with himself almost too coherently.

Elizabeth Lund - The Christian Science Monitor