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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.