This is a book of exquisite poems. About the violence of the world we live in, the serene, calming beauty which we also live in, this book is of the earth, of the material world, in a shining, and enriching way.

The poem called "Oysters" is all about violence, savoring delicacies, and the need to move, not just think. The tension of the consonants, constantly opposing each other's sounds, in conjunction with languid and nebulous vowel sounds in-between is part of what makes it such a wonder.

This book is a complete masterpiece, and I recommend it to everybody.

This was my first exposure to Seamus Heaney and his work (other than seeing the portly fellow with his unkempt white hair walking purposefully around campus here in Cambridge.) It is still my favorite collection of his work. Like all previous reviewers, I will not critique any particular poem, but only give the volume what can be one of my highest forms of praise: The poems have such a resonance that they have stayed with me long after putting the book down. That is a rare feat, in any artistic genre.

"Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense / And I am quickened with a redolence / Of the fundamental dark unblown rose." In the face of such mastery, we cannot comment or explicate, for fear of impertinence; we can only quote, and hope that something of the maker's joy communicates itself.

This was the third book of poetry that this reviewer purchased as a youth, the first two being Eliot's Four Quartets and Rimbaud's Illuminations. This book remains a favourite of ours, fifteen years after its purchase.

The Glanmore Sonnets occupy a central position in this slender but rich volume, as is fitting; it is perhaps Heaney's masterwork. The Elegy to Robert Lowell, the "welder of English" who composed "heart-hammering blank sonnets of love for Harriet and Lizzie" is also noteworthy.

There is much about the sectarian warfare of the troubled six counties of Northern Ireland, but like Dante (who appears via epigraph and translation in this book) Heane!y can transfigure the sins of his land into glorious language that is an exemplar of poetry's redemptive potentiality. "I think our very form is bound to change ... Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice."

There is much here about love, nuptial, natural, sexual. At the end of "The Guttural Muse," there is a couplet of exclusion from the joyful earthiness that the poet observes: "I felt like some old pike all badged with sores / Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life."

There is warfare and loss, violence and bliss, the joys of the flesh and the crucifixion of a country. But after reading the poems in FIELD WORK, the reader will doubtless share in Seamus Heaney's faith that "the end of art is peace."

Perhaps this book represents Heaney's finest poetry since 'Field Work.' It contains the magnificent sequence 'Squarings,' and a continuation of his Glanmore sonnets. The craftsmanship impeccable, the voice down-to-earth.

We remember especially his sonnet on Lent in which the poet deals with 'A fasted will marauding through the body,' and the poem "Wheels within Wheels," where a child spins the pedals of an inverted bicycle and notes "The way the space between the hub and rim / Hummed with transparency." Note the unobtrusive assonances, & the exact right words.

In one of the twelve-line poems of 'Squarings', Heaney counsels himself and other poets: 'Do not waver / Into language. Do not waver in it.' In this sequence, it is Heaney's happy accomplishment to have heeded that counsel in an exemplary fashion. Driving through an avenue or tunnel of trees, arching over a quarter-mile stretch of country road, Heaney sees the trees as 'Calligraphic shocks / Bushed and tufted in prevailing winds.' Could Thomas Hardy or Wallace Stevens have done as well?

Talking about it isn't good enough,

But quoting from it at least demonstrates

The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

i thought i'd read a irish writer. i couldn't think of a better choice than heaney. the poems here are subtle, but infinitely brilliant. i love the way he uses mythology in some of the pieces, taking references from dante and homer. he draws from his family life, childhood, and his lifelong experiences to create poems that are wondrous in form and content.

This startling and astonishing book is all about how we resolve the tension between living in our imaginary worlds, and what is called, reality. It's about how the imaginary and the real depend upon each other to exist, in the realm of the human. These poems are full of loss and longing, revelation, and wonder.

"A Basket of Chestnuts" is a splendid poem about what we can take with us, through keepsakes and love and memory, and what is lost as we live our lives. An engaging and transforming marvel of a poem.

Heaney has invented his own poetic form here, and he calls this form, a "Squaring." One of the Squarings:Lightenings poems is so astonishing that it leaves me breathless in how it makes the marvelous real.

Ultimately, this book is about what is real, and what is imagined, and where the line is between the two. This book suggests that the imagined is real, in its own manner, entirely real.

The lustrousness and the lusciousness, and the depth of these poems leave me astounded, grounded, invigorated, astonished, and very moved.

This book is a resounding, ever-changingly-lit, glorious, symphonic masterpiece.

I recommend this book to everybody.

This is Heaney's second collection of poems, originally published in 1969, and in a few ways it has the look of an extension of Heaney's themes of the earth, which became evident in his first book, "Death of a Naturalist," which came out in 1966.

But, this second collection is just as rich and rewarding as Heaney's first collection, which announced his poetic genius to the world.

"Rite of Spring" is one of my favorite poems in this book. All about the newness and onrush of spring, about renewal, it embodies this in a water pump, and the language is rhythmically and sonically astonishing.

When you read this magnificent collection, you'll know that you are of (and from) the earth, and you'll revel in yourself, and the earth, because of the richness and the depth of Heaney's poems. You will be more "You", and you will be more "here," "right now."

This is a gorgeous, throbbing, and mysterious collection of wondrous and wonderful poetry.

I recommend this book to everybody.

Seamus Heaney's collection of poems entitled Door into the Dark was originally published in 1969. Heaney is a Nobel laureate and it shows in this volume of poetry. Many of these poems focus on Heaney's native country of Ireland, the landscape, the rural people, the bloodshed. Sometimes Heaney takes you off the face of the planet and into a new realm. In the poem "The Penninsula," he gives the reader a sense of being on a narrow, tenuous stretch of land that seems uninhabited by humans:

The sky is tall as over a runway,/ The land without marks so you will not arrive/

But pass through, though always skirting landfall./ At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,/ The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable/ And you're in the dark again.

Many of the poems in this volume focus on rural people and the work they do, including a thatcher and a farm wife. As in other work of his, Heaney uses onomatopoeia with energy and exactness. He often forgoes traditional rhyme, but uses internal rhyme which contributes to the rhythm of the poem. Here are lines from "Thatcher" to illustrate my point: "He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,/ Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw." One of the fiercest poems in the collection is "Requiem for the Croppies." An Oxford English Dictionary is an important resource. I discovered that Croppies were Irish rebels who, in 1798, cropped their hair very short to show their alliance with the French Revolution. The sonnet seems to be a favorite form of Heaney; he uses it to describe the slaughter of the Irish rebels by English forces:

...on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave./ Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at canon./ The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave./ They buried us without shroud or coffin/ And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

I recommend keeping a dictionary nearby when you read any poetry and certainly when you read Heaney's work. You may want to look up words such as couchant, thatcher, tarn, and bespoke. A reader of poetry knows that every word of every poem is essential in appreciating and understanding the total meaning. Heaney's poetry is intense, challenging, and definitely worthwhile. I recommend any/all of his books.

This translation is perhaps as good as they get -- it reads well, rythm and cadence are flawless. And yet, a comparison of two versions side by side serves as a useful reminder that even the best translation is merely an approximation of the original. It is also evident that sometimes very substantial compromises in content are needed to preserve the structural integrity of the poetic form.

The English text, as beautiful and touching as it is in its own right, unfortunately does not reflect the very noticeably rougher texture of the Polish original. Polish text, still mostly comprehensible to the educated Polish reader, sounds distinctly archaic, and "resists" contemporary reader's temptation to read fast, as if it deliberately tried to slow him/her down.

Alas, gone as well are many poetic devices of the original, such as clever metaphors and word plays. E.g., in the fragment of Lament 2, reproduced on the amazon website, lost is the original's play on the word "piórko" (feather) which can be both a child's toy, and a poet's quill in "Jeslim kiedy nad dziecmi piorko mial zabawic"; similarly, the contrast of the SOUND of the poet's lament and the empty SILENCE of death ("plakac nad gluchym grobem", literally "to WEEP on a SILENT grave") is awkwardly lost in an admittedly smooth sounding, and more emotional "to weep on a small daughter's grave".

The fairly unfortunate "maritime" metaphor ("Looms like cliff above some wild and rough / Shore") is perhaps more in line with the Irish or English poetic tradition, but is totally out of place in Kochanowski's poem, and it unwisely replaces a wonderfully archaic, yet entirely comprehensible, and often quoted "moja nienagrodna szkoda" (literally, and in awkwardly too many words, "my loss, which no prize shall repay").

Still, given the original's complexity, the task both translators decided to tackle must have been daunting indeed, and the result is stunningly beautiful. Despite some lost or awkward metaphors, the essential core of the work, which is its profound emotional charge, comes across as strong as in the original, and so the 5-star rating is entirely deserved.

Additionally, both poets-translators probably deserve a 6th, honorary star, for taking on an important task, several centuries overdue.

I discovered this collection in a Slavic Literature class where it was required. I was deeply touched by these words of a father in mourning for his daughter; feelings expressed in the 16th Century that translate as if they were written today. Last week I was discussing Polish literature with a Holocaust survivor. When I mentioned Kochanowski's "Treny" (Laments), she got tears in her eyes and gasped- how did I know Kochanowski? She quoted a phrase in Polish, then said she always thinks about "Treny" when she thinks of her mother- it was her favorite- who was killed in Auschwitz. Today, when I gave her my bilingual copy, she held it to her heart. I could hear her heart crying when she said "thank you." Words of a daughter in mourning - and a human connection spanning four centuries.

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has compiled a collection of essays on poetry that are deeply insightful, filled with the kind of knowledge that only a master can articulate. Bishop, Yeats, Merriman, Thomas, and others are treated with deep thought, care, and honesty... Heaney is careful to acknowledge that his opinions are just that... his opinions... but he is someone who imparts so much knowledge of poetry, that his opinons would be the first I would seek out, regarding any confusions I may have regarding poetry.. This is a fabulous book! It is better than reading most poetry!

I recommend this book to everyone.

The Redress of Poetry is a series of lectures given by Seamus Heaney at Oxford; in all of them, he examines poetry and how it can be strong enough to help the reader, to act as an equal force to the life lived by the reader. He looks at all kinds of poets - Dylan Thomas, Christopher Marlowe, Yeats, Wilde and Bishop - and of course talks about his own position as a Catholic from the Northern Ireland living in Dublin. In all the lectures Heaney is wonderfully informal and funny, while still solidly getting across how important and vital these writers are. The lecture on Thomas alone is a great lesson on writing and authenticity, and the last one, "Frontiers of Writing", makes a strong case that a nation is imagined by writers first - that language, poetry, opens up possibilities in nations as well as in people. Though he knows that words can't do everything, Heaney's affection for writing and writers is convincing. At his best, he made me want to go back to the poet and read more, and not many people can make me do that!

This is still Heaney's best book of poetry to date. Centered around his 12 canto "Station Island," a poignant and disturbing 'portrait of the artist,' Station Island marked the transition in Heaney's career into the mature artist and greatest poet writing in English that we know today. A classic book of verse, written with lyrical precision and emotional power.

The title poem in this collection is one of the masterpieces of our day

Seamus Heaney is a good editor if nothing else (I'm not particularly fond of his poetry, despite his Nobel.). But, as Wordsworth says in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads included herein, "I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these poems he would decide from his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others."-Here are all the finest poems of the first and (finest some say, though I prefer Shelley) out-and-out English Romantic Poet. There's no need to go in search of massive tomes surveying his poetry and his life (unless you are one of those unfortunate creatures known as a graduate student). All the poems that justly made him famous are right here. Recommended to all for whom, "...the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Another masterpiece by the great poet. The sequence concerning the death of poet's mother is extraordinarily moving.

Daniel Tobin,published poet and Professor of English,offers exceptional insight into the work of Heaney.This book offers both an excellent overview and a fresh perspective on the deepest meaning of Heaneys poetry from 1965 to the present.Tobin advances Heaney scholarship to a new level,and makes it meaningful to student and scholar alike.

The writing here is so filled with generosity, compassion, and dark humor -- it's a most charming view of life. A coming-of-age novel about a boy who grows up in post-WW II Hollywood, shuffling between unforgettable, screwed-up parents. There's not a dead sentence here. It's short, but O'Brien captures it all. Completely re-readable. Keep it by your bedside to inspire and forgive your own life when you feel like it's trying to beat you down.

This is a MUST. Indeed it is Caulden Houlfield in Hollywood. If you like Catcher in the Rye, most likely you will love this book. It really is a great story with some great humor.

Darcy O'Brien combines the surreal humor of Flann O'Brien and the limpid prose of the young James Joyce and somehow writes a coming of age book which transcends both mentors in some ways. Lean, cool, dry, witty, but in the end, mysteriously poignant. Anthony Powell always argued that seen at close range all human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same furies, are equally extraordinary. O'Brien proves Powell's point, in prose reminscent of that master's early comic novels.