"Kinship" and "Funeral Rites," two poems in Seamus Heaney's latest volume North (1975), suggest a theme that recurs in many of his poems, namely, the importance of connection in human experience, the personal and social value of a cultural matrix within which behavior can have intelligibility. (p. 71) Heaney's first two volumes, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), are almost totally concerned with farming and domestic life in the rural area o...

Seamus Heaney's reputation for power, resonance, consummate phrasing, striking talent, uncanniness, etc.—which sprang up like a genie with his very first book, Death of a Naturalist …, and which, as the early reviews come in, still looms with tweedy arms crossed above his fifth, Field Work—is astonishing in view of his modest ambition and tone. The Irish, British, and Americans alike have taken turns rubbing the lamp, as if it were indeed Wonderful, and pure gold. But Heaney hims...

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

[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 p...

[Heaney's] work, poetry and prose alike, is rooted in the need to penetrate, claim, and express the rough exigencies of history. He seeks coherence and continuity. "Digging," the opening poem in Death of a Naturalist … and the initial poem in [Poems: 1965–1975], announces the work that will follow. Writing by a window, the poet hears the "clean rasping sound" of his father digging turf, and in that sound hears his grandfather's work before him. Digging...

In the following excerpt, Galler explores the expository nature of Heaney's poems in Death of a Naturalist.

Sculptural incisiveness is just one of the characteristics of style in Death of a Naturalist. What chiefly makes these early poems Heaney's own is another, complementary quality. Put briefly, it is a sensuous, vital energy which determines their diction, imagery, and prosody. To an unusual degree details register with an immediacy on the reader's senses. Note for example this image in "Death of a Naturalist": "the warm thick slobber / of frogspawn that grew like clotted wa...

North is Seamus Heaney's fourth book of poems. Death of a Naturalist was his first, a fully achieved book, followed by a second volume—so often observed in young poets—which was hasty and inferior, Door into Dark; followed in Heaney's case by an excellent third volume, Wintering Out, and now by North which is the best of all. One has the sense in Heaney that politics is forced upon him by the combination of nationality and circumstance…. Circumstance invades this volume&#x...