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Field Work: Poems
Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field Work he "brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world" (Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Seamus Heaney
394 books1,125 followersWorks 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
May 30, 2017
Every time I read Heaney's poetry, I feel the need of reading each poem at least three times just to get the sentiment and then another time just because it is beautiful
September 11, 2020
I’m still really enjoying my voyage through the collected works of Seamus Heaney. While this wasn’t my favourite collection (so far) it was a powerful, rewarding read with much to recommend it.
The Skunk
Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble,
At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.
The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.
After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air
Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.
And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.
It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.
The Skunk
Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble,
At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.
The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.
After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air
Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.
And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.
It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.
August 17, 2022
"Dawn sniffing revenant" I myself am a dawn sniffing revenant
September 4, 2025
some of the best the 20th c has to offer:
All round this little island, on the strand
Far down below there, where the breakers strive
Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.
-Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3
Leaving the white glow of filling stations
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills toward Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars–
Along the road, a high, bare pilgrim’s track
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs’ eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.
There you used hear guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.
Across that strand of ours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
All round this little island, on the strand
Far down below there, where the breakers strive
Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.
-Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3
Leaving the white glow of filling stations
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills toward Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars–
Along the road, a high, bare pilgrim’s track
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs’ eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.
There you used hear guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.
Across that strand of ours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
June 2, 2017
Field Work is, indeed, work for the reader. Heaney is notoriously difficult at times, peppering his poems with words such as “inwit,” “crepuscular,” “sprezzatura,” and “empery.” His symbolism is multilayered, his metaphors are sometimes obscure, and his narrative voice is constantly in flux. Of course, because he is Seamus Heaney, the hard work pays off; Field Work is a beautiful book of verse composed by the Nobel laureate at the pinnacle of his poetic career, inspired by the four years he spent in County Wicklow, a rural area south of Dublin, far from the incessant violence of Belfast, the poet’s home. The first third of Field Work is marked by poignant elegies to friends murdered during the Troubles, the wondrous Glanmore Sonnets constitute the middle third, and the final third features a series of deeply personal lyrics rooted in Wicklow’s rich soil. “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it,” Heaney writes in one of his first poems, “Digging”; in this collection, written much later, he has so evidently done just that, thereby fulfilling W. B. Yeats’s admonishment— “Irish poets, learn your trade.”
There are countless poems from which to choose to discuss because I enjoy them so much. I am touched by Heaney’s self-comparison to “some old pike all badged with sores / Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life” in “The Guttural Muse.” I am nearly moved to tears when Heaney, elegizing a friend who frequents his father-in-law’s public house, writes in a poem titled “Casualty,” “I loved his whole manner, / Sure-footed but too sly, / His deadpan sidling tact, / His fisherman’s quick eye.” I am reminded of my own meditative visit to Ireland when, in the fourth Glanmore Sonnet, I read, “He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, / The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon / And green fields greying on the windswept heights.” And finally, I recall my own romantic escapades in nature when Heaney describes intimate human contact with reference to the bark of a tree, singing “Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’ / And felt another’s texture quick on mine.” At one point, Heaney asks, “What is my apology for poetry?” For this reader, he need not defend his “trade,” to use Yeats’s term, whatsoever.
In 1979, just after Field Work was published, Denis Donoghue of the New York Times wrote that “what is exhilarating in these poems [that is, the poems of Field Work] is the relation between their two musics: the music of what happens comes first, and Heaney listens to it, receives it as a gift, like the first line of a poem; the second music is what he makes of the first, taking it into himself and finding a voice for it there.” I have yet to find a better characterization of Heaney’s poetry in this collection. In so many of Field Work’s poems, incisive, metaphor-laden reflection quickly supplants simple narrative, and the poem takes an entirely different direction than one might have first anticipated. This measured freneticism adds a certain vivacity to Heaney’s verse, accentuated by his return to the long line, which he disfavored for the short one in most of his previous works. However meditative, however thoughtful, poems such as “The Otter” and “Oysters” leap off of the page with the energy and dynamism of “green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux.”
While I have read a number of Heaney’s poems in the wide-ranging volume of selected works, Opened Ground, this is his first book that I read from cover to cover, and it was sheer joy. Heaney’s intelligence, wit, and poetic ability are unmatched by other Irish poets whom I have studied, barring W. B. Yeats. I am eager to read another Heaney collection all the way through—and soon.
There are countless poems from which to choose to discuss because I enjoy them so much. I am touched by Heaney’s self-comparison to “some old pike all badged with sores / Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life” in “The Guttural Muse.” I am nearly moved to tears when Heaney, elegizing a friend who frequents his father-in-law’s public house, writes in a poem titled “Casualty,” “I loved his whole manner, / Sure-footed but too sly, / His deadpan sidling tact, / His fisherman’s quick eye.” I am reminded of my own meditative visit to Ireland when, in the fourth Glanmore Sonnet, I read, “He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, / The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon / And green fields greying on the windswept heights.” And finally, I recall my own romantic escapades in nature when Heaney describes intimate human contact with reference to the bark of a tree, singing “Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’ / And felt another’s texture quick on mine.” At one point, Heaney asks, “What is my apology for poetry?” For this reader, he need not defend his “trade,” to use Yeats’s term, whatsoever.
In 1979, just after Field Work was published, Denis Donoghue of the New York Times wrote that “what is exhilarating in these poems [that is, the poems of Field Work] is the relation between their two musics: the music of what happens comes first, and Heaney listens to it, receives it as a gift, like the first line of a poem; the second music is what he makes of the first, taking it into himself and finding a voice for it there.” I have yet to find a better characterization of Heaney’s poetry in this collection. In so many of Field Work’s poems, incisive, metaphor-laden reflection quickly supplants simple narrative, and the poem takes an entirely different direction than one might have first anticipated. This measured freneticism adds a certain vivacity to Heaney’s verse, accentuated by his return to the long line, which he disfavored for the short one in most of his previous works. However meditative, however thoughtful, poems such as “The Otter” and “Oysters” leap off of the page with the energy and dynamism of “green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux.”
While I have read a number of Heaney’s poems in the wide-ranging volume of selected works, Opened Ground, this is his first book that I read from cover to cover, and it was sheer joy. Heaney’s intelligence, wit, and poetic ability are unmatched by other Irish poets whom I have studied, barring W. B. Yeats. I am eager to read another Heaney collection all the way through—and soon.
May 28, 2023
“And I was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that it’s tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.”
Heaney puts it perfectly to perfect words.
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that it’s tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.”
Heaney puts it perfectly to perfect words.
June 14, 2023
Ms Harts fave for a reason <3
March 14, 2022
These poems are a bit too dark and depressing for me...also reminds me that although I still see myself as Northern Irish I actually don’t know much about Ireland or it’s history or the Irish culture which makes me feel like a fraud. Not the biggest fan of Seamus Heaney’s work.
February 11, 2013
I didn’t realize Seamus Heaney was from the North until I read Field Notes, and I think it shows. The first poem, “oysters” caught my attention right away with its description of “frond-lipped, brine-stung” bivalves. Heaney’s language, like that of all the great Irish writers, is sensual and sentimental, but whereas Irish poets evoke Irishness, but Heaney conjures up Ireland itself. In the first of the Glanmore Sonnets, Heaney describes the fog over “the turned-up acres” of a freshly ploughed field as “steaming,” a place where the traveler’s “ghosts come striding into their spring stations.” I think I would be very happy to spend a season doing nothing but reading Heaney and walking in Ireland.
July 23, 2019
Reaffirms Seamus Heaney's status as one of the greatest modern English language poets. It is a shame he left us what seems far too early 6 years ago.
A gem.
A gem.
May 28, 2022
I have been, while in my fortnight on the isle, on a literary tour of Ireland, traversing the dense impactful prose of James Joyce, Colum McCann, Roddy Doyle and John Banville, but it’s the verse of Seamus Heaney that has hit home. This volume is a masterwork of insight and imagination, taking us through his sad self-exile out of Northern Ireland in the elegies of his murdered friends and relatives, then discovering the natural balm that the Irish countryside itself provides for his healing. He even courts his land when he’s writing is his time in California. The Glanmore Sonnets are special, a decalogue of verse and labor inmixed in a dream of nature. It’s the final poem, his deft translation of the Ugolini episode in Dante’s Divine Comedy that returns the reader back to Ireland’s troubling history with England, a past marked by subjugation, starvation and famine. It’s an eloquent and powerful testament to the long atonement due to the tyrants of history.
March 30, 2021
I took a class that studied these poems, the background explaining the writing along with the author's and Ireland's complicated history. These poems are so incredibly multi-dimensional with sometimes two and three meanings per line or stanza. Amazing how much Heaney can pack into so few words.
Had I not taken the class, I would not have understood the poems and depth and probably would not have liked them. I am typically not a fan of poetry but I have become a Seamus Heaney fan during this course!
The rating was difficult to develop. A 2 because I am not a poetry fan. A 3 because of the difficulty. Of course, that is based on my ignorance and lack of background understanding in literature and Irish history. A 5 for the course but that truly belongs to our facilitator Jim Poag. Thank you Jim and my intelligent and insightful classmates!!
Had I not taken the class, I would not have understood the poems and depth and probably would not have liked them. I am typically not a fan of poetry but I have become a Seamus Heaney fan during this course!
The rating was difficult to develop. A 2 because I am not a poetry fan. A 3 because of the difficulty. Of course, that is based on my ignorance and lack of background understanding in literature and Irish history. A 5 for the course but that truly belongs to our facilitator Jim Poag. Thank you Jim and my intelligent and insightful classmates!!
July 28, 2026
pag.139 Lavorando sul campo. dí Marco Sonzogni
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Questa condivisione mi ha donato la possibilità di ri-conoscere Heaney, di ri-scoprire l'intima universalità delle sue esperienze, di ri-badire la fiducia - con le parole che pronunciò dal podio del Nobel di Stoccolma -
«nella forza che la poesia ha di fare quello per cui le si dà e sempre le si darà credito: la forza di persuadere la parte vulnerabile della nostra coscienza di essere nel giusto, a dispetto di tutte le ingiustizie che le sono intorno; la forza di ricordarci che siamo cacciatori e raccoglitori di valori, e che le nostre stesse solitudini e angosce sono degne di credito, nel senso che esse, pure, sono un pegno della nostra autentica umanità.»
March 14, 2019
Finished: 14.03.2019
Genre: poetry
Rating: A+++
#ReadingIrelandMonth19
Conclusion:
Poetry continues to happen as it should
...in silence and solitude.
Enjoy one of the greatest Irish poets...Seamus Heaney.
My Thoughts
Genre: poetry
Rating: A+++
#ReadingIrelandMonth19
Conclusion:
Poetry continues to happen as it should
...in silence and solitude.
Enjoy one of the greatest Irish poets...Seamus Heaney.
My Thoughts
June 16, 2021
A few duds, but the ones that strike true, strike hard. The poems memorializing people killed in The Troubles...oof. Some of his love poems, which seem to be preoccupied with sexual metaphors, are pretty good too.
July 20, 2026
I was lucky enough to see Seamus Heaney at Boston College when he came to read his poetry at St. Ignatius as part of the Lowell Lecture series.
January 27, 2014
In "Field Work," sometimes Seamus Heaney lays on the poetry so thick that it makes me wince. I wish this collection had a little bit more of "My people think money and talk weather" and a little bit less of "My tongue moved, a slow relaxing hinge." And while I can't say I liked this book, I admit I'll probably go back to it again. It beguiles even as it bothers. As Gertrude Stein once said, "A masterpiece may be unwelcome but it is never dull."
May 3, 2016
Since the death of Seamus Heaney, I returned to this work and had another look. I tried to read a poem or two each day and then relate them to the quilts made by Helen Heron (Northern Ireland). Both of them are/were such scholars who loved to explore the classics and then translate them into their own art forms (he - poetry; she-textiles). My favorite poem here remains the seductive "Oysters."
June 8, 2009
Read Heaney. A feast of poetry. Great enough to be your last meal, beautiful enough to weep. I especially loved the Glanmore Sonnets. So seamlessly he meditates from the Irish landscape to the landscape of his mind, his heart.
August 13, 2016
4.5 stars
PopSugar 2016: A book of poetry (x)
PopSugar 2016: A book of poetry (x)
May 12, 2024
re-reading all the poems 😭
April 17, 2024
field work? more like iconic work
July 28, 2022
Seamus Heaney writes about the troubles in Northern Ireland, but also displays a broad range of themes and interests such as love poems and nature poems. Many of the his poems in this collection take the form of elegies for his friends killed in the sectarian conflict such as the excellent “Casualty” and “The Strand of Lough Beg,” as well as elegies for dead friends not related to the conflict. Poems such as the series of sonnets known as the Glanmore Sonnets show his range and breath, being celebrations of the natural beauty found at Glanmore, and in the earlier sonnets poems they are partially self-referential poems that speak of his changing range as an artist now within Glanmore and away from the Troubles, finding new sources of inspiration and acknowledging within his poetry a kind of shock at finding new sources of inspiration.
“Triptych” is three poems in one about the conflict in Northern Ireland. The first poem recalls a memory of two young men with gun described as “profane” and ends with the an image of a young girl bringing food home seemingly oblivious and content in her actions from the hinted violence at the beginning of the poem, which hints at the everyday comforts of home life and small local village, and that normal life goes on for the average person after large acts of political violence. The middle talks about the land itself describing it as “neutered” and it’s “loneliness,” while describing the speaker’s longing to find an “unmolested” flower. This images refers to the speakers search for innocence and peace, suggesting nothing can truly remain at peace and innocent in this conflict. The second poem has sibyl who answers the speaker’s desperation about the future with predictions that the future will be full of cycles of continued conflict, unless people can find it in themselves to break the cycle. In the final poem, the speakers visits a crumbling monastery and old pagan images representing dying and old religions. It then focuses on an upcoming protest and the military helicopters who look like the new deities and wonders if he should offer what poor and meager things he has to it, suggesting the conflict in Northern Ireland is the worship of death and this is the new religion.
“The Toome Road” narrates the appearance an armored car with soldiers on the property of a local farmer. He wants to run and warn the rest of the countryside about these invaders who try to artificially fit into the land with camouflage, but the ending suggests that although these foreigners come with guns they will never cow the Irish and their resistance, whose center remains “untoppled” and “invisible” to these invaders.
The opening poem “Oysters” describes the opulence, but also the violence of eating live oysters. He further emphasizes their connection with opulence and wealth by reflecting on Ancient Romans hauling Oysters down to their city. Even though he is participating in this opulence and violence by eating oysters the last stanza suggests he doesn’t “trust” or have confidence in this feeling of “repose.” He senses something dangerous and problematic about enjoying these oysters. There is a danger in relaxing in our opulence and happiness, oblivious to the darker side and the cost of our pleasures. He compares this to other purer joys like poetry and hanging out by the sea.
“A Drink of Water” is a poem about an old lady who provides him with water from a bucket. Although initially describing her as an “old bat”, by the end of the poem he realizes the importance of gratitude for those who provide us with things and the suggestion that she might be a source of inspiration from which he “dipped to drank again.” The lesson is that even seemingly little things or ugly images
may serve as artistic inspiration. The poems attention to sound is especially striking.
“An Afterwards” is an amusing poem imagining a hell and appropriate punishment for poets in the vein of Dante, expressing the wish of the poet’s wife who wishes he could enjoy time with his kids and family more and not always be so obsessed and serious about his poetry. To stop and smell the rose and leave his task as a poet behind.
“Triptych” is three poems in one about the conflict in Northern Ireland. The first poem recalls a memory of two young men with gun described as “profane” and ends with the an image of a young girl bringing food home seemingly oblivious and content in her actions from the hinted violence at the beginning of the poem, which hints at the everyday comforts of home life and small local village, and that normal life goes on for the average person after large acts of political violence. The middle talks about the land itself describing it as “neutered” and it’s “loneliness,” while describing the speaker’s longing to find an “unmolested” flower. This images refers to the speakers search for innocence and peace, suggesting nothing can truly remain at peace and innocent in this conflict. The second poem has sibyl who answers the speaker’s desperation about the future with predictions that the future will be full of cycles of continued conflict, unless people can find it in themselves to break the cycle. In the final poem, the speakers visits a crumbling monastery and old pagan images representing dying and old religions. It then focuses on an upcoming protest and the military helicopters who look like the new deities and wonders if he should offer what poor and meager things he has to it, suggesting the conflict in Northern Ireland is the worship of death and this is the new religion.
“The Toome Road” narrates the appearance an armored car with soldiers on the property of a local farmer. He wants to run and warn the rest of the countryside about these invaders who try to artificially fit into the land with camouflage, but the ending suggests that although these foreigners come with guns they will never cow the Irish and their resistance, whose center remains “untoppled” and “invisible” to these invaders.
The opening poem “Oysters” describes the opulence, but also the violence of eating live oysters. He further emphasizes their connection with opulence and wealth by reflecting on Ancient Romans hauling Oysters down to their city. Even though he is participating in this opulence and violence by eating oysters the last stanza suggests he doesn’t “trust” or have confidence in this feeling of “repose.” He senses something dangerous and problematic about enjoying these oysters. There is a danger in relaxing in our opulence and happiness, oblivious to the darker side and the cost of our pleasures. He compares this to other purer joys like poetry and hanging out by the sea.
“A Drink of Water” is a poem about an old lady who provides him with water from a bucket. Although initially describing her as an “old bat”, by the end of the poem he realizes the importance of gratitude for those who provide us with things and the suggestion that she might be a source of inspiration from which he “dipped to drank again.” The lesson is that even seemingly little things or ugly images
may serve as artistic inspiration. The poems attention to sound is especially striking.
“An Afterwards” is an amusing poem imagining a hell and appropriate punishment for poets in the vein of Dante, expressing the wish of the poet’s wife who wishes he could enjoy time with his kids and family more and not always be so obsessed and serious about his poetry. To stop and smell the rose and leave his task as a poet behind.
July 11, 2021
"Wait then... Breasting the mist in sowers' aprons,/ My ghosts come striding into their spring stations./ The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows."
Okay, ugh. Where do I begin.
I first read this collection for my A-Level in English Literature. I'd loved Heaney beforehand - we'd studied some of his more famous poems lower down the years in school, my beautifully eloquent and slightly crazy English teacher adored him, and I shared that adoration. But nothing could prepare me for the experience I had this collection.
Revisiting these poems more recently, about 3 years after first studying them and 2 years into my degree in Geography, I sense an incredibly tight relationship between Heaney's poetry and the landscapes he lived in. Poetry can be such a beautiful representation of the reciprocity between the human and the land, and Heaney captures a real sense of love and adoration, but at once, a hostility towards rural Ireland. Throughout this anthology, the fields are a place of escapism but also of the childhood experiences which shaped and informed his political, poetic, familial identity as an adult. The simultaneous sense of safety and alert I sense in these poems really strikes a nerve with me. I'm not sure why.
I think what is so mesmerising about Heaney's work is the density with which he wrote his poetry. Every word is dripping in meaning, in texture, in real love for language. Field Work, in my view, is indebted to the work of Yeats, and Keats, and the classic English literary canon, which I maybe why I love this anthology so much. If you're going to start anywhere, start with the Glanmore Sonnets. They set you up on a journey which kind of really, I think, summarises the rest of the thematic arch of the anthology. Then to the early poems - The Toome Road and Casualty resonate with the early identity crises we feel in the beginning of the Glanmore series, and the later poems far more with the last few Sonnets, which are far more reflective on his relationships - both with his family, but also the landscapes and people of his childhood.
Overall, a beautiful collection, I think one of his best. I wish Heaney was still living so I could write more about him in the present tense.
Okay, ugh. Where do I begin.
I first read this collection for my A-Level in English Literature. I'd loved Heaney beforehand - we'd studied some of his more famous poems lower down the years in school, my beautifully eloquent and slightly crazy English teacher adored him, and I shared that adoration. But nothing could prepare me for the experience I had this collection.
Revisiting these poems more recently, about 3 years after first studying them and 2 years into my degree in Geography, I sense an incredibly tight relationship between Heaney's poetry and the landscapes he lived in. Poetry can be such a beautiful representation of the reciprocity between the human and the land, and Heaney captures a real sense of love and adoration, but at once, a hostility towards rural Ireland. Throughout this anthology, the fields are a place of escapism but also of the childhood experiences which shaped and informed his political, poetic, familial identity as an adult. The simultaneous sense of safety and alert I sense in these poems really strikes a nerve with me. I'm not sure why.
I think what is so mesmerising about Heaney's work is the density with which he wrote his poetry. Every word is dripping in meaning, in texture, in real love for language. Field Work, in my view, is indebted to the work of Yeats, and Keats, and the classic English literary canon, which I maybe why I love this anthology so much. If you're going to start anywhere, start with the Glanmore Sonnets. They set you up on a journey which kind of really, I think, summarises the rest of the thematic arch of the anthology. Then to the early poems - The Toome Road and Casualty resonate with the early identity crises we feel in the beginning of the Glanmore series, and the later poems far more with the last few Sonnets, which are far more reflective on his relationships - both with his family, but also the landscapes and people of his childhood.
Overall, a beautiful collection, I think one of his best. I wish Heaney was still living so I could write more about him in the present tense.
February 11, 2026
This is the fifth book in my Seamus Heaney read. Published in 1979 this is a collection tinged with the effects of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. There are poems that make explicit mention of the victims of shootings and bombings, including those murdered on Bloody Sunday.
But there's also his continuing poetry of the rural landscape of Ireland with the dropping of the names of plants and animals. Sometimes as things real and sometimes as similes. Sometimes, a habit he has since 'Digging' in the first collection farming - ploughing in particular - is used as a metaphor for writing and poetry:
Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.
There's something about Heaney's use of words. There isn't always rhyme - or even often - but the something in the selection of words that hits home. He's still doing his chain lines, where three or four things are linked together:
..Sirens of the tundra
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
Note the "eel-road, seal-road, keel-road" rhyming and rhythm.
There's also love poems in here, particularly the Glanmore Sonnets, which alongside 'The Otter' and ' Casualty' were my favourite poems in the collection.
But there's also his continuing poetry of the rural landscape of Ireland with the dropping of the names of plants and animals. Sometimes as things real and sometimes as similes. Sometimes, a habit he has since 'Digging' in the first collection farming - ploughing in particular - is used as a metaphor for writing and poetry:
Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.
There's something about Heaney's use of words. There isn't always rhyme - or even often - but the something in the selection of words that hits home. He's still doing his chain lines, where three or four things are linked together:
..Sirens of the tundra
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
Note the "eel-road, seal-road, keel-road" rhyming and rhythm.
There's also love poems in here, particularly the Glanmore Sonnets, which alongside 'The Otter' and ' Casualty' were my favourite poems in the collection.
March 18, 2018
The Heaney kitemark is here in strength, a whole vocabulary of farming life, some curious rhymes hinting at a local accent, puzzlement when the countryside code giving right of way to herded cattle confronts an uncompromising convoy of armoured cars, or an innocent rural journey is tracked by a military helicopter. More elegies for lost friends than you might expect until you notice the manner of their deaths; 'The Troubles' continue and the poet, perfectly aware of the violence, remains stubbornly committed to his art. These are not still life odes to the countryside but rather to people who happen to belong there; they are affectionate rather than critical, loving and not angry. "You aspired to a kind, / Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact."
The poems in this volume are more challenging and less accessible than his previous books, easy and pleasant to read but not to understand or even appreciate, demanding much more analysis, and a guide to supply the key for many. Is that because they are more mature and so more sophisticated or are some struggling a bit? I will pick a guide or two soon, but for now my project is still to read only the poetry.
The poems in this volume are more challenging and less accessible than his previous books, easy and pleasant to read but not to understand or even appreciate, demanding much more analysis, and a guide to supply the key for many. Is that because they are more mature and so more sophisticated or are some struggling a bit? I will pick a guide or two soon, but for now my project is still to read only the poetry.
July 23, 2024
“already homesick for the big lift of these evenings,”
I’m in awe of these poems. He manages to create moments that I yearn to be a part of, they so perfectly and artistically represent some unique moment among the millions of moments experienced by all the millions of people. They feel universal yet so unbelievably personal. A way of seeing the world possible through only his eyes, and then given as a gift to us all. They capture the beauty of the countryside, and people living in the countryside, and the subtle ways that light shifts and time hangs and lets the people see the beauty.
There is a vividness to them, like they’re crawling out his dreams, like we’re witnessing him painting what he sees with the interpretation of his conscious, like even he can’t see the difference between his own beautiful vision and the world as it exists.
“The end of art is peace.”
A fitting line, for when I read these poems I feel like I’ve found peace in my heart, the peace at the end of the scrambling search for life’s meaning. I can be at ease, satisfied that someone has seized upon that beautiful thing that is fully experiencing life as it’s given to us.
I’m in awe of these poems. He manages to create moments that I yearn to be a part of, they so perfectly and artistically represent some unique moment among the millions of moments experienced by all the millions of people. They feel universal yet so unbelievably personal. A way of seeing the world possible through only his eyes, and then given as a gift to us all. They capture the beauty of the countryside, and people living in the countryside, and the subtle ways that light shifts and time hangs and lets the people see the beauty.
There is a vividness to them, like they’re crawling out his dreams, like we’re witnessing him painting what he sees with the interpretation of his conscious, like even he can’t see the difference between his own beautiful vision and the world as it exists.
“The end of art is peace.”
A fitting line, for when I read these poems I feel like I’ve found peace in my heart, the peace at the end of the scrambling search for life’s meaning. I can be at ease, satisfied that someone has seized upon that beautiful thing that is fully experiencing life as it’s given to us.
December 17, 2022
This may be his best anthology. 'North', the celebrated one before, is brilliant, stark, artfully economical with its words, and explores a brilliant metaphor of tribal killings in Denmark... but it's a little one-note, a little like Heaney filtering himself a bit strictly. On 'Field Work', he relaxes the metre a little, dips a little into the more romantic side of the art, and meantime retains his assured political criticism, the rage and the humanity within... and it's brilliant. It's Peak Heaney.
'Oysters' is brilliant, sensual, tantalising; the perfect choice to open an anthology full of glistening promise. Not political enough? 'Casualty' is a stylistic tour de force, propelled along by a brilliant fluid rhythm. And never has a poet comparing his wife to a skunk - a literal skunk - sounded actually romantic instead of a horrible insult. Here is the societal and the personal, the political and the lyrical, Heaney's pastoralism unified with his unfathomably brilliant wordplay, the Troubles, his tenderness... this is his best work.
'Oysters' is brilliant, sensual, tantalising; the perfect choice to open an anthology full of glistening promise. Not political enough? 'Casualty' is a stylistic tour de force, propelled along by a brilliant fluid rhythm. And never has a poet comparing his wife to a skunk - a literal skunk - sounded actually romantic instead of a horrible insult. Here is the societal and the personal, the political and the lyrical, Heaney's pastoralism unified with his unfathomably brilliant wordplay, the Troubles, his tenderness... this is his best work.
September 23, 2021
27 poems in a slim text from 1979, deeply imbued with Irish references, and many dedicated to the memory of an Irish national. Certainly worth reading and Heaney at times pierces with his imagery or a turn of phrase, but for some reason this collection didn’t resonate completely with me.
My favorite was Part X of the Glanmore Sonnets:
“I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
And in that dream I dreamt – how like you this? –
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.”
My favorite was Part X of the Glanmore Sonnets:
“I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
And in that dream I dreamt – how like you this? –
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.”
December 9, 2023
Stunning collection of Seamus Heaney poetry from the 1970s. A number of the early poems in this volume are shot through with a sense of hopelessness in reaction to the violence in Northern Ireland, during which Heaney lost close friends. Half way through, after he had abandoned Ulster for the Republic of Ireland the tone becomes more personal, with rural life as both a healing force and a place to contemplate and connect with loved ones. The final poem is a translation of Dante, which in its anger and vituperative tone shows us that although Heaney left Ulster it was never far from his mind. Favorite poems: “At the Water’s Edge” (Part 3 of Triptych), “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “Casualty,” “The Guttural Muse,” “High Summer,” and “In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge.”
One of the great poets of the English language and this is a great way to get into his work. Some poems take a little work, but it’s such deep and rewarding work.
One of the great poets of the English language and this is a great way to get into his work. Some poems take a little work, but it’s such deep and rewarding work.
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