[Selected Poems 1965–1975] is an impressive little book in that the poems have an obsidian polish and are obviously made to last; that some will, there is no doubt. They are documentary, rural poems shaped out of spare packed words, as if written by a staccato Edward Thomas. The best are pure lyrics like "Anahorish", "The Given Note", and "A New Song"; the least compelling are the ones whose intentions impose on the reader—the well-known bog poems for example….

What has opened my eyes to Mr Heaney's quality is his prose, backhanded though the compliment may seem…. [The calibre of Preoccupations] is such as to establish Mr Heaney as that rarest of rare birds, a serious critic in the class of Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Like them he has the advantage (I would say the sine qua non) of being a practitioner of the art he examines….

The...