SOURCE: Greenlaw, Lavinia. “Seeing and Believing.” New Statesman 127, no. 4403 (18 September 1998): 54.

In the following review, Greenlaw praises the poetry of Opened Ground, summarizing Heaney's achievements from Death of a Naturalist to the present.

Opened Ground, as Seamus Heaney says in a prefacing note, is neither a selected poems nor a collected. Twice the size of his New Selected Poems: 1966-1987, it includes subsequent work, some uncollected pieces, dramatic excerpts and his Nobel address, an illuminating essay that reflects on “a journey into the wideness of the world … into the wideness of language.” It is worth these 500 pages to be able to trace that journey's ripples and backwash; to see how Heaney's poems call to, question and answer one another; how he turns his subjects over and over, angling and reexamining them with the self-effacing scrutiny of Elizabeth Bishop, her “tipping / Of an object toward the light.”

Heaney's poetry is...