Seamus Heaney: Poems 1965 1975

by Seamus Heaney

This volume gathers nearly all of the poems from Heaney's first four Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975).

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature, Literature, Classics, 20th Century, High School

Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Works of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections Wintering Out (1972) and Field Work (1979) as well as a translation of Beowulf (1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney on Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Rosemary Standeven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reminded of one of my favourite poems recently by a Goodreads friend who was reading through the works of Seamus Heaney. I had not remembered who had written the poem – but remembered the poem itself so vividly from my school days – over 40 years ago. ‘Mid-Term Break’ is a poem once read, will always be remembered. Its universal enduring partiality is shown by Googling half its last line: “A four foot box, …” – and the whole poem appears. The poem beautifully depicts the numbness and detachment that you go through when a young person close to you suddenly and unexpectedly dies. The tears come later. The shock forces you to focus on minutiae, on the ordinary that has become extraordinary – because thinking about what has happened is too horrific, too much to cope with.
I decided that I had to read more about Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and bought an Audible collection of his first four books: Death of a Naturalist; Door into the Dark; Wintering Out; and North, read by Seamus Heaney himself. It was a real joy to listen to – no silly voices, just a poet reading out his works, with the accents placed perfectly on the words, where he intended them to be. And the poems were wonderful. While ‘Mid-Term Break’ remains my favourite, there were so many more that caught my eye, and I had to buy a hard copy of ‘Seamus Heaney 100 Poems’ so I would always have them on hand to dip into again. Seamus Heaney’s imagery is often exquisite, and his feel for the sounds that his words create just wonderful. Listening to the poems read aloud adds a new depth to their mastery.
Some of my favourites from each book:
From the book ‘Death of a Naturalist’, a poem about building long-lasting relationships

"Scaffolding"
"Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.”

‘Door into the Dark’ was my least favourite of the four books. The poems were still very good, but none leapt out at me.
In ‘Wintering Out’ my favourite was the sad, empathetic “Limbo”

“Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I'm sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ's palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there.”

‘North’ was divided into two sections: Part I containing poems about death and the Irish bog, and Part II relating to the Irish ‘Troubles’. From the second section

> “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”
I
I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of 'views
On the Irish thing'. I'm back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,
Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads
As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and Sten,
Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:
'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree.'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.'
'They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably ...'
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.
…III
"Religion's never mentioned here", of course.
"You know them by their eyes," and hold your tongue.
"One side's as bad as the other," never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung
In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the "wee six" I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.
…

I highly recommend these four books of poetry. Buy hard copies to read – or, better still, listen to Seamus Heaney reading them aloud (and buy the books!)

[Rosa Jamali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Digging
Seamus Heaney
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


Seamus Heaney talks a lot about nature and Irish landscapes, in this poem we see a kind of farming range of vocabulary, the cold smell of potato mould and the stance the poet gives to pen here is amazing; it reminds me of the quote that "The Pen is Mightier than Sword".

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My boy Seamo, representing for the Hibernian-English.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heaney, the Nobel Laureate poet, has an interesting impact on people. His poems are undeniably refined and precise. He has a gift of placing words together in ways that seem naturally placed, and perfect. He has tremendous knowledge of the past, and mythology frequently finds its way into his poems. This selection of his poems includes some of his best poems. To me, the best of the selection is tightly related to Ireland. Having driven around the coastline of Ireland, I can remember the scenery of “Shoreline”.

Turning a corner, taking a hill
In County Down, there’s the sea
Sidling and settling to
The back of a hedge. Or else

A grey bottom with puddles
Dead-eyed as fish.
Haphazard tidal craters march
The corn and the grazing.

All round Antrim and westward
Two hundred miles at Moher
Basalt stands to.
Both ocean and channel

Froth at the black locks
On Ireland. And strands
Take hissing submissions
Off Wicklow and Mayo.

Take any minute. A tide
Is rummaging in
At the foot of all fields,
All cliffs and shingles.

Listen. Is it the Danes,
A black hawk bent on the sail?
Or the chinking Normans?
Or currachs hopping high

On to the sand?
Strangford, Arklow, Carrickfergus,
Belmullet and Ventry
Stay, forgotten like sentries.

One of his masterpieces is “Funeral Rites” which is also included in this collection. The Newgrange burial mounds hold a special place in world history, not just that of Ireland. He brings them current in this poem.

I
I shouldered a kind of manhood
stepping in to lift the coffins
of dead relations.
they had been laid out

In tainted rooms,
their eyelids glistening,
their dough-white hands
shackled in rosary beads.

Their puffed knuckles
had unwrinkled, the nails
were darkened, the wrists
obediently sloped.

The dulse-brown shroud,
the quilted satin cribs:
I knelt courteously
admiring it all

as wax melted down
and veined the candles,
the flames hovering
to the women hovering

behind me.
And always, in a corner,
the coffin lid,
its nail-heads dressed

with little gleaming crosses.
Dear soapstone masks,
kissing their igloo brows
had to suffice

before the nails were sunk
and the black glacier
of each funeral
pushed away.

II
Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps
of a cortege, winding past
each blinded home.
I would restore

the great chambers of Boyne,
prepare a sepulcher
under the cupmarked stones.
Out of side-streets and bye-roads

purring family cars
nose into line,
the whole country tunes
to the muffled drumming

of ten thousand engines.
Somnambulant women,
left behind, move
through emptied kitchens

imagining our slow triumph
towards the mounds.
Quiet as a serpent
in its grassy boulevard

the procession drags its tail
out of the Gap of the North
as its head already enters
the megalithic doorway.

III
When they have put the stone
back in its mouth
we will drive north again
past Strang and Carling fjords

the cud of memory
allayed for once, arbitration
of the feud placated,
imagining those under the hill

disposed like Gunnar
who lay beautiful
inside his burial mound,
though dead by violence

and unavenged.
Men said that he was chanting
verses about honour
and that four lights burned

in courners of the chamber:
which opened then, as he turned
with a joyful face
to look at the moon.

Heaney is not for everyone. He is not a romantic poet given to swoons of emotion. His poetry, however, is both current and nostalgic, and highly intellectual. For lovers of modern poetry, he is essential.

See my other reviews here!

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some lovely lines and interesting subject matter, without any doubt a wonderfully gifted and great poet, (the Nobel prize isn't just awarded to anyone) but alas Heaney's just isn't for me. I have read all the major Irish authors/poets; Joyce, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Kavanagh, Stoker, McCourt, Brown, Beckett, Trevor, Synge, O'Casey, and Heaney is one of the greats that I definitely would recommended passing the time of day with.

[Keisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ran across his name years ago in a college class. I read a few poems and was immediately drawn to his words though I couldn’t say why. Returning to this poems decades later I know. His words are so uniquely grounded and anchoring.

[Pia · Rating 5 out of 5]

man this guy is obsessed with bogs

this was really good, i loved it, certified heanyhead for sure

[Sabne Raznik · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are a few of my favourite things!

When Seamus Heaney first released this, on CD, he was still alive. So it is an unconventional Collected in that it is audio, the poet was still alive, and it was incomplete. (He published one more print collection before he unexpectedly died.)

My CDs were damaged. And replacing them hasn’t been possible yet. So I went looking for another way to listen to them. I found the recordings split into 3 volumes on Audible. It was worth saving 6 months’ worth of credits to buy them all.

Especially since someone, I suspect his widow, has taken the time to collect recordings of readings of every poem from his final print collection and add them to the Collected that may be exclusive to the Audible version. Thus the Collected is now complete.

[J. Wootton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a long time at this one.

This is in part because, right up until the end, I made a purely arbitrary 'policy' of only reading this collection whilst aboard an airplane (a condition I don't often find myself in), but more because Heaney's work is beyond me about as often as it is not.

I should point out that I am not one of those people who extols a writer because one is supposed to. Critics are taken in at least as easily as the masses - indeed I think 'common sense' hits closer to the mark more often than critical consensus - and so normally, when I find myself unable to appreciate a much-touted thing I assume the fault is not in me. But when it comes to Heaney... I wonder.

Here is what I suggest. If you love poetry, you will enjoy this book and find those poems that you do grasp to be ample reward for those that you don't. Although some background awareness of the history and culture of 20th-century Ireland and its poets (Yeats and Kavanagh in particular) would be extremely helpful before you begin, keeping the internet close at hand while you read would likely suffice.

I hope I haven't scared you off. I just mean to say - some poetry is light reading, and this is not that sort. Half a collection is a full meal of thought, or more, and it takes time to digest, but it's well worth it.

[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a stack of poetry books that I read from every evening and some of them I get so caught up in that I read the whole thing in one sitting while others I read a few poems at a time. I guess that is a measure of how much I like them. Well, this book of poetry has been in that stack for over a year, maybe two, and I usually would read one poem from it and then pick up a different book. I think I can safely say it's not one of my favorites. Well, I finally finished it last night, wahoo! My problem with Heaney's work was that it seemed many of the poems started off well but would soon trail off into meaningless gibberish. Just not the type of thing I enjoy.

[Rose Chaplin · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars
I love seamus heaney and I loved reading this collection so much. The copy I have is my mums old A level one and it’s so lovingly worn and annotated and it was so nice to slowly work my way through the book and see the remnants of her reading this at the same age as me. I think I like his writing so much because it is so accessible in simplicity and humility but are still some of the most beautiful, sensual and nostalgic poems I have read. Pretty nature stuff is just so good 😝

[Meagan Cahuasqui · Rating 3 out of 5]

not the kind of poetry I'm used to reading but I appreciated the imagery and Irish themes throughout

[Jasmine Ringer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t read the whole thing…just Irish landscape porn

[Robin (*´ω｀*) · Rating 2 out of 5]

while i understand the impact and quality of his poetry, seamus heaney has to be one of the most boring people in the history of ireland. what is his problem

[Andrew Belanger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poetry focused on Irish life and landscape. Seamus Heaney is a master with words.

[Tom Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

His reflections run wide, deep, and True.

Listening to his response to Little Things, Old Friends, Places or Nature’s Simple Wonders the Reader knows that he’s hearing the thoughts and feelings that arise from deep inside Heaney’s Mind and Heart. His words resonate with the sound of Truth.

[Scarlett Elliott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately this was not one of my favourite poetry collections I’ve read. I had heard good things about Seamus Heaney but he just isn’t for me, I guess. There was some poems I did really enjoy but overall the majority wasn’t hitting.

[Keeley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read Beowulf, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and scattered other verse, I knew on some level that Heaney had a magnificent way with language. I'm glad I read this collection of four of his poetry books. They are moving, intellectually stimulating, aural delights. Night especially engages with the Troubles; thinking about how much (albeit imperfect) process Ireland has made since, one can only hope resolution will come also some day for Israel and Palestine.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An added bonus of poetry on CD is how you can use it to make your own selected poems. That poem that unaccountably made it into the poet's own selected poems, that poem that somehow didn't - all put right with a little patience.

Every one of his collections had at least one classic poem in it, though the collections as a whole, to my mind, peak with Station Island. Death of a Naturalist remains my favourite, with a strong showing from North, the so-called 'Bog Poems', and Wintering Out.

I heartily recommend his prose as well, especially The Redress of Poetry.

[Anna Mosca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just love his poetry and I love hearing his voice, excellently, reading his own poems. This will remain one of my favorite books for sure but in this case I prefer the paper version, voice goes in and out too fast and I’m used to savor his poems.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The master.

[sif (slump era) · Rating 1 out of 5]

im glad he cant ever write again

[Cc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ironic distance, the poems about wanting to have something serious to write about, the highly skilled deployment of language, the particular lens through which he analyzed the world: these are all very "current". He is very smart and subtle about the way he constructs a poem. Each one is well made and can easily be seen to have multiple meanings (the poet himself, Ireland, and sometimes 'art'). But the same problem I've had as with Hass is that he seems to just be telling us what he already knows. There is no element of questioning, surprise (if there is, it is a well-planned and carefully constructed one), it seems the poet is always instructing us on facts and views that he has already fully worked out for himself. And if he is describing uncertainty, it is a calculated uncertainty with ironic distance. The nuance in his readings of human conflict feel like the nuance you would get from a well intentioned but condescending NYT piece. I did enjoy though North Part II which is acknowledged as having a marked change in tone - more conversational, less overly written. It felt like Heaney was hiding behind language for much of the first three books, hiding a lack of things to say. You can tell that Heaney was a fan of Cavafy though because of what he tries to do with archaeology, history, culture. The difference to me is that Cavafy approaches his subjects with total earnestness (even when he is being ironic, it's playful and it's not for the sake of protecting himself, as an entity, Cavafy the author) and does not feel the need to explicitly connect them to his present circumstances. Heaney's insistence on forging this connection sometimes feels heavy handed and after a while repetitive (prob contributing to my sense of him not having much to say for the first 3.5 books beyond what he already articulated in the first)..and it also feels lacking a bit in self awareness, and a little bit excessive in intensity (to my taste at least, this detracted from the poetic impact for me) as he says near the end of "North," 'veins bulging on the biro', and you also lose the sense of the historical persons treated with their full dignity - they become a means to an end. Cavafy allows each figure (even his fictional characters!) to do something independent, different and complex: he does not need to restrain them to be vehicles for a certain type of expression; Cavafy in this way felt much less limited by time and ego while Heaney's first three books did not, they felt products of time politics and the mindset of the moment. Although he makes up for this in "the unacknowledged legislator's dream" which I thought was quite charming.

[Malachy Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the thing I’ve decided I like the most about Seamus Heaney, is that his work bridges, the gap between very structured rhyme and meter, like Yeats uses, and more freeform work like Bukowski.

I really enjoyed this collection, especially North, which tackled some pretty serious subject matter in a way that I found really interesting. Definitely can recommend, and I will be reading the second collection as well.

[Paula Norburgh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Book 46 of 2025 - Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney - This is a spoken-word recording of Seamus Heaney's poems read by himself. I did not listen to this in one go but dipped in and out. As everyone knows he is the Northern Irish and won the Nobel prize. Also, as everyone knows he loves chatting on about nature, in this collection we hear all about the surroundings he seems to love: cows, bogs and rain. There is the obvious references to politics of course throughout his work.

[Peter Wiercioch · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

Totally understand and respect what Heaney is doing in this collection but damn, do the poems ever feel overstuffed. It's like he's filling every gap I want to breathe in. I can respect the craft, what he's doing, recognize his skill, but I did not feel anything from this work. The Irish-centric parts, did also lose me to be honest. Eh, not for me.

[Daniel Lucke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, sentimental, and clever. I don't remember where, but I once heard Heaney called "the poet of friendship" and I like that a lot. Something about his poetry makes me feel much more like a piece within a collective than some brash and lonely self.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read some of Heaney’s poems in isolation from each other. But this was my first time reading them as a unified whole. And the experience was really lovely. “North” was definitely my favorite collection.

[Isabella Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*

[Vitória · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book holds some of the best, most irish poems about potatoes i have ever read in my life.