[Of] the 10 essays in Preoccupations (there are also 11 short reviews), only one stands out: the Berkeley lecture (1976) called "Englands of the Mind," in which Heaney discusses the ways in which sense of place functions as "a confirmation of an identity which is threatened" in the poetic language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin. The distinctions drawn between Hughes' Anglo-Saxon, Hill's "Anglo-Romanesque," and Larkin's "English language … turned humanist" and "besomed clean of its inkhornisms and its irrational magics by the eighteenth century" are both interesting and convincing. But when Heaney writes about his own childhood or about the poets who have meant most to him—Wordsworth, Hopkins, Yeats—he is given to commonplaces….

[And] Heaney's statements of poetics, whether his own or that of others, are curiously bland….

There is not a statement here with which anyone would want to take issue for these are, after all...