The early stuff is quite good, mostly because it's simply about nature and life and the things done in life and nature. Once Heaney seems to have made the decision to become an Irish Poet (TM), I lost interest. I can't fault him for making his poetry local or reflecting his experiences as an Irishman, but somehow it just wasn't that interesting to me, especially after the solid stuff earlier on in his work.

The overtly political stuff is completely without interest to me, and not the sort of thing that makes for good poetry; it didn't work for Dante, for Milton, for Shelley, or for any number of poetasters of the last century. Politics in poetry is only manageable when it is masked in allegory, the way of The Faerie Queene or Absalom and Achitophel.
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Summary: A selection of the poetry of Seamus Heaney from previously published works between 1966 and 1987.

My one previous encounter with Seamus Heaney was his rendering of Beowulf, a powerful version of this Old English heroic narrative. I’ve long wanted to explore his poetry and a while back picked up this collection, gathering a number of poems from the first half of his writing career (subsequently, an edition covering 1988 to 2013 was released).

The poems in this selection come from the following works:

Death of a Naturalist
Door in the Dark
Wintering Out
Stations
North
Field Work
Sweeney Astray
Station Island
The Haw Lantern

How does one summarize and review all this? One reviewer described reading Heaney as “muddled clarity.” I would agree with this assessment. Heaney demands multiple readings and this was merely my first taste. In the middle of a poem, you wonder what he is saying, and then a phrase leaps out and rivets your attention.

His work evokes the land–the bogs and trees, the fields and hedges, the broagh or riverbanks, that together create a sense of place. He captures the people–the farmers, the roof thatcher, and the Tollund Man, a mummified corpse found in one of the bogs. He remembers the dead, from Francis Ledwidge, who died in World War I to his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney (“M.K.H”) in Clearances that evoke all the memories of a loved one, the parting of death, and the awareness of our mortality.

The violence present in Northern Ireland is a frequently present backdrop to his poetry as is the imagery of Irish Catholicism from missals to masses. Much of this comes together in the last poem in this collection, The Disappearing Island:

Once we presumed to found ourselves for good

Between its blue hills and those sandless shores

Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil.

SEAMUS HEANEY, P. 261.

The collection includes selections from Sweeney Astray, Heaney’s version of the Irish poem Buile Shuibhne, the Glanmore Sonnets, and Station Island.

One should have a phone or computer handy to look up words and references that may be obscure to one. Perhaps some day, an annotated version of Heaney’s works will do this work for us. But for now, we are left to do the work for ourselves. Some will pass this up, but some of the richest readings are the ones that have required me to dig. Heaney’s works seem to me to be among these. In this we join Heaney who compared his work to that of his potato farming father:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests

I’ll dig with it.

SEAMUS HEANEY, “DIGGING,” P. 3. ( )

Beautiful and boggy. ( )

I haven't read everything in here but I've read quite a lot. They're not bad, they're just not for me. I'm not a huge fan of poetry anyway and Heaney's poems are just all too similar, almost feels like I'm reading the same thing dozens of times. ( )

I had not read any new poetry to speak of in many, many years. More fool I. Seamus Heaney was the Real Thing; he takes his place among my top echelon, with Yeats, Frost, and Herbert. I cannot overstate my enthusiasm for this book; I will be going out immediately to find the rest of Heaney's work.

One thing that strikes me forcibly about the early poems in this volume is how much they are rooted in the Old English and Old Norse tradition. I have barely scratched the surface of commentary on Heaney's work, but I suspect this is widely overlooked due to a journalistic preoccupation with Ireland and its Troubles -- which is obviously a central subject. The metric form of the early work, with its two-stress half-lines is derived from the traditional Germanic verse form, though the alliteration is mainly dropped. Heaney openly acknowledges this in "Bone Dreams," where he writes of "pushing back"

to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.

And the poems are full of allusions to Norse saga and Old English literature -- I am fortunate enough to have the background to pick up those references, I would love to be able to help those who don't.