SOURCE: A review of Field Work, in New Republic, Vol. 181, No. 3389, December 22, 1979, pp. 31-3.

In the following essay, Pinsky provides a favorable review of Field Work.

The poems of Seamus Heaney give several kinds of pleasure: first of all, he is a talented writer, with a sense of language and rhythm as clean, sweet, and solid as newworked hardwood. Beyond that, his previous book, North, showed inspiringly that his talent had the limberness and pluck needed to take up some of the burden of history—the tangled, pained history of Ireland. Heaney's success in dealing with the murderous racial enmities of past and present, avoiding all the sins of oratory, and keeping his personal sense of balance, seems to me one of the most exhilarating poetic accomplishments in many years.

It is no real dispraise of Field Work to observe that it is a less original, less heroically...