SOURCE: Pratt, William. Review of Opened Ground, by Seamus Heaney. World Literature Today 73, no. 3 (summer 1999): 534.

In the following review, Pratt highlights the influence of Ireland and Irish culture in the poems of Opened Ground.

Ireland is a country of only about four million people, but in this century it has produced four Nobel Prize winners in literature: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney. To average one world-famous writer for every million people is a record that makes a small nation like Ireland seem singularly blessed. Some might say its literary blessing comes at the price of a political curse, since the island has long been one of the world's trouble spots. The political curse, however, has often been a boon to Irish writers. “Out of Ireland have we come / Great hatred, little room,” Yeats once remarked poetically. And James Joyce, a voluntary exile, the one indisputably great Irish writer...