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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32261 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 479 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In "Digging", the first poem in Opened Ground, Heaney likens his pen to both spade and gun. With these metaphors in place, he makes clear his difficult poetic task: to delve into the past, both personal and historic, while remaining ever mindful of the potentially fatal power of language. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, where any hint of Gaelic tradition in one's speech was considered a political act, Heaney is all too aware of the dire consequences of speaking one's mind. Indeed, during times of crisis, he has been expected to appear on television and dispense political wisdom. Most often, however, he stays out of the fray and opts for a supreme sense of empathy to guide his words.

As excavator--of earth, of his beloved Gaelic, of his own life--Heaney is unmatched. In "Bone Dreams", the archaeologist's task is synonymous with reaching for a cultural past:

I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies,
Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen

to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.

And in early poems like "Blackberry Picking", Heaney's images--deftly, delightfully--carry us back to childhood fields:

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full...

Opened Ground is a pleasure and a triumph. These three decades of work confirm Heaney as one of the most important poets of his time. --Martha Silano

Synopsis
A reissue of Heaney's "New Selected Poems 1966-1987", which has been expanded to include work from two subsequent collections, "Seeing Things" and the award-winning "The Spirit Level", as well as poems not previously published.

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Customer Reviews

Very special poetic voice
Heaney is a very special poet, similar in my mind to Yeats and Dylan Thomas, with a Zen Buddhist twist - an underground clearly visible through the influences of the Chinese poet Han Shan "Cold Mountain". Like Zen poetry he is often very simple, linear, and descriptive on the surface yet with lots of intertwining symbolism, language play and richness working to create a poetic reality true to external reality yet ripping open to a more profound reality in his attempt to "stabilize truth" as Ben Johnson has said. He is also often times very oblique in his simplicity - a challenge to any poetic mind. This collection also includes his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Crediting Poetry" which is a gem. He is a modern classic. This collection includes most of his best works as well as an excerpt from his play "The Cure at Troy".

Excellent!
I really enjoyed reading 'Opened Ground' as part of my English A level course, especially the 'bog' poems in 'Wintering Out' and 'North'. Heaney has an extraordinary fascination with the discoveries of various iron age bodies as shown by his deeply but clearly expressed emotions and feelings in each of his poems. They are all easy to read and follow making me feel as if I could really relate to what Heaney saw and felt.

Epoch making collection from a marvellous poet
Although, as an Advanced Higher student, I feel a slight bias towards the opening "Death of a Naturalist" poems in the collection, this book is the definitive edition from a man whose ability with onomatopoeic language is unsurpassed. It amazes me how Heaney manages via clever juxtaposition and lexical choice, to create such menacing cacophonies of sound which assault the senses - the prime example being in "Death of a Naturalist" - even the poet admits 'the air was thick with a bass chorus'. Heaney derives greatly form Kavanagh, Wordworth, and, of course, Hughes, yet I feel that he has taken his poetry to a new level of self exploration, within the contexts of childhood, mythology and his own culture. For want of a better epithet, it is sheer poetry.