Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996

by Seamus Heaney

Overview

As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other—"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)—and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374526788
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/25/1999
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	870,036
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

Table of Contents

Author's Note

from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

Digging
Death of a Naturalist
The Barn
Blackberry-Picking
Churning Day
Follower
Mid-Term Break
The Diviner
Poem
Personal Helicon

Antaeus (1966)

from Door into the Dark (1969)

The Outlaw
The Forge
Thatcher
The Peninsula
Requiem for the Croppies
Undine
The Wife's Tale
Night Drive
Relic of Memory
A Lough Neagh Sequence
The Given Note
Whinlands
The Plantation
Bann Clay
Bogland

from Wintering Out (1972)

Fodder
Bog Oak
Anahorish
Servant Boy
Land
Gifts of Rain
Toome
Broagh
Oracle
The Backward Look
A New Song
The Other Side
Tinder (from A Northern Hoard)
The Tollund Man

Nerthus
Wedding Day
Mother of the Groom
Summer Home
Serenades
Shore Woman
Limbo
Bye-Child
Good-night
Fireside
Westering

from Stations (1975)

Nesting-Gound
July
England's Difficulty
Visitant
Trial Runs
The Wanderer
Cloistered
The Stations of the West
Incertus

from North (1975)

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
1. Sunlight
2. The Seed Cutters
Funeral Rites
North
Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
Bone Dreams
Bog Queen
The Grauballe Man
Punishment
Strange Fruit
Kinship
Act of Union
Hercules and Antaeus from Whatever You Say Say Nothing
Singing School
1. The Ministry of Fear
2. A Constable Calls
3. Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966
4. Summer 1969
5. Fosterage
6. Exposure

from Field Work (1979)

Oysters
Triptych
After a Killing
Sibyl
At the Water's Edge
0The Toome Road
A Drink of Water
The Strand at Lough Beg
Casualty
Badgers
The Singer's House
The Guttural Muse
Glanmore Sonnets
An Afterwards
The Otter
The Skunk
A Dream of Jealousy
Field Work
Song
Leavings
The Harvest Bow
In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
Ugolino

from Sweeney Astray (1983)

Sweeney in Flight

The Names of the Hare (1981)

from Station Island (1984)

The Underground
Sloe Gin
Chekhov on Sakhalin
Sandstone Keepsake from Shelf Life
Granite Chip
Old Smoothing Iron
Stone from Delphi
Making Strange
The Birthplace
Changes
A Bat on the Road
A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
A Kite for Michael and Christopher
The Railway Children
Widgeon
Sheelagh na Gig
'Aye' (from The Loaning)
The King of the Ditchbacks
Station Island from Sweeney Redivivus
The First Gloss
Sweeney Redivivus
In the Beech
The First Kingdom
The First Flight
Drifting Off
The Cleric
The Hermit
The Master
The Scribes
Holly
An Artist
The Old Icons
In Illo Tempore
On the Road

Villanelle for an Anniversary (1986)

from The Haw Lantern (1987)

Alphabets
Terminus
From the Frontier of Writing
The Haw Lantern
From the Republic of Conscience
Hailstones
The Stone Verdict
The Spoonbait
Clearances
The Milk Factory
The Wishing Tree
Grotus and Conventina
Wolfe Tone
From the Canton of Expectation
The Mud Vision
The Disappearing Island
The Riddle

from The Cure at Troy (1990)

Voices from Lemnos

from Seeing Things (1991)

The Golden Bough
Markings
Man and Boy
Seeing Things
An August Night
Field of Vision
The Pitchfork
The Settle Bed from Glanmore Revisited
A Pillowed Head
A Royal Prospect
Wheels within Wheels
Fosterling from Squarings
Lightenings
Settings
Crossings
Squarings

A Transgression (1994)

from The Spirit Level (1996)

The Rain Stick
Mint
A Sofa in the Forties
Keeping Going
Two Lorries
Damson
Weighing In
St. Kevin and the Blackbird from The Flight Path
Mycenae Lookout
The Gravel Walks
Whitby-sur-Moyola
'Poet's Chair'
The Swing
Two Stick Drawings
A Call
The Errand
A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also
The Strand
The Walk
At the Wellhead
At Banagher
Tollund
Postscript

Crediting Poetry (1995)

Crediting Poetry

Index of Titles
Index of First Lines

Editorial Reviews

[This collection] eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today.” —Edward Mendelson, The New York Times Book Review

“Perhaps the best descriptions of Seamus Heaney's extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre come from the poet's own work. Mr. Heaney has created a remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' while at the same time remaining 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being.'” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Having just reread most of his poems, I find myself more, not less, interested, and convinced that I have only begun to plumb their bracing depths . . . The poems stay in the mind, which is the one essential feature of major poetry.” —Jay Parini, The Nation

“Heaney's commitment to the independence of his art, to the pursuit of shape and richness and abundant ambiguity, is also a profound commitment to the quality of public life . . . In a dark time, Heaney . . . has turned borders and dividing lines into rich frontiers.” —Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

If you can't afford all 12 of Nobel Laureate Heaney's previous works, here is a selection spanning 30 years. Heaney stays close to the ground in his measured, meditative poems, reveling in the everyday — but since the everyday in Ireland can mean sectarian violence, there's a dark edge, too.

Library Journal