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Heaney's fourth collection explores Ireland as a place of conflict: the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland compared with the multiple invasions of Ireland over the centuries, by Normans, Vikings, and others. This collection also includes Heaney's famous poems about the bodies preserved in bogs: "The Bog Queen", "The Grauballe Man", "Punishment", and "Strange Fruit", among others. These are rightly remembered: the strongest pieces in the collection, they capture the timeless presence of the bog bodies and the history of conflict, cultures, and love, which they hold. Heaney's imagery in these is rich, imaginative, and absolutely fresh. In the first half of the collection, poems explores Ireland's history, perceiving Ireland as a tender, feminine presence, which is being plundered by outside forces. There's something troubling about Heaney's view of Ireland as a sexualised, female entity. The second half focuses directly on Belfast and Derry in the 1970s, as well as delving into Heaney's personal history. These poems have less depth and nuance than the earlier pieces, but have an immediacy and a weight of emotion. The poems in this collection, often in quatrains, both rhyming and unrhyming, give that sense, as the best poetry does, that Heaney is expressing a unique thought and in the only possible language to do so. This is an uneven collection, but full of energy, and demonstrates the brilliance of Heaney's imagery as well as his deftness and memorability as a poet.