[Heaney's] work, poetry and prose alike, is rooted in the need to penetrate, claim, and express the rough exigencies of history. He seeks coherence and continuity. "Digging," the opening poem in Death of a Naturalist … and the initial poem in [Poems: 1965–1975], announces the work that will follow. Writing by a window, the poet hears the "clean rasping sound" of his father digging turf, and in that sound hears his grandfather's work before him. Digging becomes at once a signal of origins and legacies and a sounding of Heaney's own poetic ambitions. He has "no spade to follow men like them," so he will dig instead with his pen…. The metaphor is meant to articulate the method by which the poet will carry on, while at the same time departing from, the family tradition. Although the fancy may be somewhat strained and self-important, Heaney's intention is clear enough: he wants connections, continuities, and historical justification for his art.

In one essential particular the truth of the metaphor is redeemed, for in many of his poems Heaney does dig with his pen, excavating, unearthing histories of families, country, and self. But in the poem's opening lines, he also describes the feel of the pen in his hand as "snug as a gun." The figure is at first glance rather impressive, and its apparent authority is boosted by the clicking backward rhyme; but what has this terrorist image to do with agriculture, archaeology, or intellectual exertion of any sort? I question the integrity of this core metaphor because it prefigures a larger problem in Heaney's work…. [It] must be said that his ambition, which is in almost every way admirable and pure, does on occasion lead him to will connections by virtue of overwrought metaphor, leading him into good writing which is not always good poetry. The danger for someone of Heaney's abundant talent is that his aspiration will spiral his work away from integral metaphoric truth. But when the two, aspiration and metaphoric truth, are unified, the poetry is exact, deliberate, and natural, as in "At a Potato Digging."… This poem is an extraordinary meditation on natural dependencies, Irish sorrow, the body as bearer of history, the legacies of deprivation and blight. The language has the gritty sonority one hears in Dante…. (pp. 558-59)

A poet often writes prose to articulate an investigative technique or explanatory procedure, by which his intended discovery, probably initially intuited, may be claimed and justified. An exhibition of need and will, it's also an act of self-declaration. The essays in Preoccupations demonstrate Heaney's aspirations, his awareness of his own position in the larger poetic tradition, and an account of those patterns of exploration which comprise the nervous system of his verse. Heaney is almost obsessively concerned with what we might call the natural history of language, its origins, morphologies, homologies. Whatever the occasion—childhood, farm life, politics and culture in Northern Ireland, other poets past and present—Heaney strikes time and again at the taproot of language, examining its genetic structures, trying to discover how it has served, in all its changes, as a culture bearer, a world to contain imaginations, at once a rhetorical weapon and nutriment of spirit. He writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with the received wisdom….

Heaney's essays are studded with reiterated phrases and notions, but such repetition is less a sign of indolence than of a coherent and strong-willed intellect testing, tuning, and revising its themes. (p. 560)

At every point, Heaney shows himself a discriminating and intense diagnostician of the poetic tradition. He brilliantly explains the way in which poetry issues from the roughly shaped, vaguely stirring beginnings in intuition and compulsion. He draws firm distinctions between his predecessors, clarifying that diversity (and divisiveness) which gives such quarrelsome vitality to poetic tradition….

The most crucial distinction Heaney makes regarding the writing of poetry is that between craft [and technique]…. (p. 561)

North, the last volume collected in Poems: 1965–1975, suffers from the dominion of craft over technique. The territory, as in all of Heaney's books, is clearly demarcated. North is in large part an anthology of death chants, songs of bones and boglands, anatomizations of the body of language and history, another dig into the geological strata of culture, its residues, seepages, signs. A number of the poems, however, like the early "Digging," demonstrate the triumph of rhetoric over theme, of mere good writing over investigative vision…. Poems like "Bog Queen," "The Grauballe Man," and "Kinship," which at first shine forth with the sort of writing that one might praise for its ingenuity and intensity, are finally so clenched, or so overwrought in metaphor, that they inevitably become little more than a stage on which the poet performs. When style comes unstuck from feeling, subject matter dissociated from thematic explorations, the result is the kind of poem that bullies the reader into admiration. (pp. 561-62)

I'm not suggesting that Seamus Heaney is going stale, or that his inspiration is failing, or that he is writing too much. I do, however, feel obliged to say that at this point in his work, now that the public office has imposed itself upon the private, and now that Field Work has shown that he still has not resolved what seem to me major questions of craft and vision (questions appropriately asked only of a poet of unmistakably major talent), he may now need to be more vigilant than ever. (p. 562)