I've admired Seamus Heaney's work, but have preserved my distance from it: almost no human beings, but grainily humble perceptions in terse lines. There are some further capable poems in this mode in … [North]; yet I confess to being more interested in the group of poems from the book's Part II. There, because he has been pressed to, Heaney writes about being a poet in Ulster in time of The Troubles. "What ever you Say Say Nothing," one of these poems has it; Heaney's way is the way of an Irish poet writing sixty years after Yeats's "Easter, 1916" or "Meditations in Time of Civil War." He carries it off with both dignity and gallows humor; in fact I hadn't fully realized until these poems showed me, how sly and expert is the presence of their poet…. I found the relative talkiness of these concluding poems, their reach towards...