Robert Pinsky in the New York Times:
“The Poems of Seamus Heaney” amplifies a reader’s understanding of the poet’s accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating. With a lucid, chronological format for the Contents page, the volume’s editors invite readers to sample the honorable outtakes and preliminaries, the range-finding preparatory studies, that underlie for instance the haunted vision of “North” (1975) or the magisterial yet intimate scope of “Station Island” (1984).
Early on, the quite young Heaney had already mastered his distinctive combination of observant, nearly prosaic reporting with the chewable consonant clusters and ecstatic syntax of Gerard Manley Hopkins — as in “Digging,” the famous, beloved poem that opens his debut volume, “Death of a Naturalist” (1966), published when Heaney was not yet 30.
More here.
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