"Kinship" and "Funeral Rites," two poems in Seamus Heaney's latest volume North (1975), suggest a theme that recurs in many of his poems, namely, the importance of connection in human experience, the personal and social value of a cultural matrix within which behavior can have intelligibility. (p. 71)

Heaney's first two volumes, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), are almost totally concerned with farming and domestic life in the rural area of Northern Ireland where he grew up. Profoundly aware of the traditions that once gave meaning to rural Irish life—the land, the rhythms of farming and fishing, family customs, the mysteries of nature and love—he is equally aware that rural Ireland has nearly lost its customary life. Many of the poems in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark look back longingly to the old ways. Heaney's more recent volumes, Wintering Out...