Opened Ground

As an image of deep feeling between husband and wife submerged beneath the hardworking routines of rustic domesticity, who could improve upon 'love/ like a tinsmith's scoop/ sunk past its gleam/ in the meal-bin'? Who would not thrill to the glimpse of two men with a woodsaw cutting 'Into a felled beech backwards and forwards/ So that they seemed to row the steady earth' from a poem 12 years later? Nobel Prize-winner Heaney's wonderful, not-quite-complete collection, Opened Ground, infiltrates such pleasures into a weave of responsible, self-questioning poetry that captures the physicality of things, as well as the restless conscience of a poet concerned to give due weight to his ancestry and to the violent sectarianism of his Irish background. Each volume sampled here introduces bright and surprising new threads into the oeuvre. There are even a few touches (in The Haw Lantern) of postmodern playfulness. And Seeing Things has an elegiac sequence (for both parents) to die for. One of the richest books of poetry in our language. (Kirkus UK)