[Since Seamus Heaney] is a poet of sustained achievement and since his life has touched so many sides of Ireland—North-South, rural-urban, violent-pacific—he is contended for, like a valuable piece of land, by squads of contrary critics. The intensity of these critical responses suggests how much his poetry, as well as the political situation he sometimes describes, affects. (p. 3)

From his first poem, "Digging," in his first book, Death of a Naturalist, Heaney pulled away from poetry of overt political purpose…. This, though, may have been a resolution more easily arrived at in 1966, before the resurgence of violence in the North. In any case, since then Heaney has sought more elaborate and remote imagery in which to implant his oblique commentaries, though at times he is willing, outside his poems, to decode his imagery in order to point up his thematic purposes. In 1979, for example, he contributed...