Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996
The best single-volume introduction to Heaney's work, spanning Death of a Naturalist through The Spirit Level. It includes all the bog poems, the elegies, the Glanmore Sonnets, and the remarkable "Station Island" sequence (a Dantesque encounter with the shades of Irish literary history). Opened Ground shows the full arc of the greatest English-language poet since Larkin: his journey from the rural Catholic North to cosmopolitan Europe.
Heaney's tact is the trouble. In 'Punishment' he watches a bog girl executed by her tribe and admits he 'would have cast, I know, the stones of silence'; the bog poems generally turn the Troubles' dead into beautiful archaeology while the war ran on. Across its four hundred pages the selection also dilutes: the late, airier work floats free of the early density.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
