Opened Ground

From the Irish Nobel laureate: Essential poems selected by the author from throughout his career, plus several previously unselected works and his Nobel lecture.

“[This collection] eloquently confirms his status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today.” —Edward Mendelson, The New York Times Book Review

Opened Ground includes the essential poems from Seamus Heaney’s twelve previous volumes of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from The Cure at Troy (Heaney’s version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes) and Sweeney Astray (an adaptation of the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne) and several previously uncollected poems. It closes with his Nobel Lecture, “Crediting Poetry,” since, as he explains, “the ground covered in the lecture is ground originally opened by the poems which here precede it.”

“Perhaps the best descriptions of Seamus Heaney's extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre come from the poet's own work. 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.'” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Having just reread most of his poems, I find myself more, not less, interested, and convinced that I have only begun to plumb their bracing depths. . . . The poems stay in the mind, which is the one essential feature of major poetry.” -Jay Parini, The Nation

“Heaney's commitment to the independence of his art, to the pursuit of shape and richness and abundant ambiguity, is also a profound commitment to the quality of public life. . . . In a dark time, Heaney . . . has turned borders and dividing lines into rich frontiers.” -Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books