What do You think about Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1999)?
When Seamus Heaney writes, "Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, snug as a gun," that "snug as a gun," is for me the sound of Seamus Heaney. Of course it is not the only sound of Seamus Heaney. These poems clash, hiss, whisper, whoosh, hum, splash, and ring, but the guttural, earthy grunting is always there: hum, gulp, pluck, pump, slung, glut, plunge, muddied, puddled, scuffled, clutch, grunts, muck, slugged, thumped, mush, rump, and more.The Ireland of Heaney's memories is a place of earth and water. It is muddy. I was reminded of something I read once about some tropical place: it was a land of abundant life, and ever-present death. Heaney's poems teem with nature, with bats, hares, crows, badgers, seals, otters, gulls, eels, and bluebottles thriving among the flax, blackberries, moss, ferns, sycamores, mistletoe, rushes, and foxgloves. And yet, everywhere, death looms. The poems I found most memorable were usually those full of death. "Requiem for the Croppies," where the rebels had pockets full of barley to eat, and next spring barley plants grew from their mass grave. Poems such as "Bog Queen" and others, describing ancients who had died by violence. "Station Island," where the author, on a religious pilgrimage, meets the ghosts of people he once knew, and they tell the stories of their violent deaths. The candles, and coffins, and corteges of village funerals. And Heaney's retelling of the Sweeney legends, how the mad king scrabbles to survive in the wild landscape, and ends being speared to death as he drinks milk from a hole made by a boot heel in the dung. And Heaney's retelling of Ugolino, from Dante, how a man unfairly imprisoned with his children, watches the children die before him.For Ireland is here, both ancient and modern, but so is the world. Heaney may have been raised in a barn, boiling potatoes and picking blackberries, but he is also a scholar. He has read Dante, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Bible. He has traveled Europe and the Americas. He speaks the curt words of field and bog, but also the polysyllabic language of books: crepuscular, zoomorphic, somnambulant, irrevocable, prismatic, lineaments, diminuendo. What can he not do? He can create poems both local in focus and universal in scope, poems of visual clarity and emotional depth, and that make you think.I saw Seamus Heaney when he spoke at Syracuse University. When he finished speaking, and walked forward through the aisle to exit the auditorium, I reached out and laid my hand on his shoulder, because I wanted to be able to say that I had touched Ireland's greatest living (at that time) poet. And so I did.
—Cheryl Gatling
Have owned this volume for years and sampled from it on occasion. For some reason the poems had never really connected with me. I don't know if it was Heaney's recent death or my rapid advance through middle age but my latest foray into this volume has made me a believer.The first poem that got me was "Mid-Term Break", a heart-breaking but entirely unsentimental look at the death of a much younger sibling. Things just get better from there. "Clearances," an homage to Heaney's mother, is stunning. "Blackberry-Picking" is a tour de force, connecting nature, family and mortality deftly and seamlessly. One of my very favorite poems in the volume is its very last, "Postscript," the last line of which is "...And catch the heart off guard and blow it open." No more accurate statement could be made about Heaney's work. Opened Ground is a wonderful place to appreciate it.
—Scott Reeves
This should really be on my "always reading shelf." I love his poetry. It's grounded, almost smelling of the earth (of his native Irish soil), and gritty without being graphic or turning too hard an edge. In an interview following the publication of his new translation of Beowulf, Heaney talks of the old Anglo-Saxon poet and the warrior culture evoked in the poem. He speaks about the heart of the poet grieved by the cruelty of the world, the loss of home, of safety, of companions: a grief not unknown in modern Ireland. I hear the same voice in much of his own verse; there is, as he puts it, a knowledge that "the world is not quite trustworthy, but we must be grateful for it when it is."Note: How sad that Heaney is gone! (added September, 2013)
—Sarah Ryburn
