"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 (1972) and North (1975) both broaden and deepen his subjects. Aware of the need to develop his own imagination on the one hand and conscious of being part of a violent and ungovernable society on the other, he looks for answers in the bogland, in the goddess-mother whose "wet centre is bottomless" ("Bogland"). His imagination is stimulated by traces of the ancient Irish language he finds embedded in bogland placenames that have survived the imposition of English. These words may enable one to make contact with an ancient Irish spirit. For a present-day Northern Ireland, which has lost its cultural roots, he finds "antecedents" in the traditions of prehistoric societies recently discovered buried in Danish and Irish bogland. The archaeological evidence reveals people apparently obsessed with violence and murder, sometimes ritualized, more often merely self-indulgent. (pp. 71-2)
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