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Overview
As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other—"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)—and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."
Synopsis
As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other—"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)—and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
...[A] remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' ...[and remain] 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being'....[his] art, in Mr. Heaney's own words....'commemorates the endurance of the private in the face of history and public grief.'
Editorials
Edward Mendelson
The ground opened by his pen...is dense with the bodies of the ancient and recent dead, and the emptiness left by his digging is filled with glowing visionary memories....a collection with a satisfying heft and more than enough variety of subject and style...— The New York Times Book Review
Michiko Kakutani
...[A] remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' ...[and remain] 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being'....[his] art, in Mr. Heaney's own words....'commemorates the endurance of the private in the face of history and public grief.'—The New York Times
Library Journal
If you can't afford all 12 of Nobel Laureate Heaney's previous works, here is a selection spanning 30 years. Heaney stays close to the ground in his measured, meditative poems, reveling in the everyday — but since the everyday in Ireland can mean sectarian violence, there's a dark edge, too.Elizabeth Lund
Heaney...renders the truth about both the external and internal worlds, balancing the bitter with the beautiful.— The Christian Science Monitor
Irish America Magazine
[A] delight...John Kerrigan
...[A] grand new retrospective volume....Fuller than a selected poems yet more abstemious than a collected, Opened Ground presents Heaney's dialogue with himself almost too coherently.— London Review of Books
Michiko Kakutani
Eschewing ideology and 'the diamond absolutes' of partisans on both sides in Northern Ireland, Mr. Heaney has created a remarkable series of poems that stay 'true to the impact of external reality' while at the same time remaining 'sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being'.#151;The New York Times Book Review