[In the following review, Pratt highlights the influence of Ireland and Irish culture in the poems of Opened Ground.]

Ireland is a country of only about four million people, but in this century it has produced four Nobel Prize winners in literature: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney. To average one world-famous writer for every million people is a record that makes a small nation like Ireland seem singularly blessed. Some might say its literary blessing comes at the price of a political curse, since the island has long been one of the world's trouble spots. The political curse, however, has often been a boon to Irish writers. “Out of Ireland have we come / Great hatred, little room,” Yeats once remarked poetically. And James Joyce, a voluntary exile, the one indisputably great Irish writer never honored by a Nobel Prize, wrote even more bitterly about his native land, “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

Heaney can be every bit as scathing as Yeats or Joyce about the Irish character, “we slaughter for the common good,” he says in one of his poems. But his gift for language, combined with his frequent quarrels with his native land, have earned him his place in the distinguished line of Irish writers. The quarrels seem more evident in the ample new collection Opened Ground than in the slimmer volumes which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1995. Of all Ireland's Nobel laureates, Heaney seems most consistently agitated about Irish politics, especially the still-smoldering civil war that clouds many of the poems in this ample volume, which, he insists in a foreword, is a selected and not a collected works.

Unlike Yeats and Shaw and Beckett, his Nobel predecessors, Heaney is identified with the Irish Catholic majority, even if he comes from Northern Ireland, where the majority are Protestant Irish. In Ireland, it could be argued, the minority always has the most compelling voice: Yeats was a Protestant born in the South, and Heaney is a Catholic born in the North. As Heaney notes in his Nobel Lecture, “Crediting Poetry” (printed here as a prose epilogue to the poems), “Yeats barely alluded to the civil war or the war of independence in his Nobel speech … he chose to talk instead about the Irish Dramatic Movement.” Thus Heaney, speaking to a world audience, acknowledged an artistic as well as religious difference from Yeats, for Yeats was preeminently a lyric poet, whereas Heaney has been prevailingly a polemical poet. Yeats dramatized himself as “a sixty-year-old smiling, public man” self-critically, tracing the conflicts in Irish politics to classical and biblical roots of human imperfection; Heaney has written about the troubles around him more painfully, as proof of man's natural inhumanity to man, his “kinship” with his savage ancestors. Even when indignant, Yeats always managed somehow to sing, “and louder sing / For every tatter in his mortal dress,” whereas Heaney seems obliged to speak out even when he sings.

He speaks as much as he sings in all his poems, even his most moving poems about the vast peaty wetlands that are a unique feature of the Irish landscape. They become his poetic symbol for Ireland, from “Digging,” the first poem in the collection, through “Bogland” and “The Tollund Man” and the “Bog Queen,” poems which made him famous as the Poet of the Bogs. Heaney anguishes again and again over the feudal tribalism of the Irish, who have inherited a sort of national suicide wish that threatens to catch everyone in its lethal net. Those relatively few, early bog poems are his major legacy, eloquent in their probing of historical conscience, going below the more recent Protestant and Catholic hatreds into primeval Celtic behavior, “domains of the cold-blooded,” where stark evidence of a murderous past has been perfectly preserved in the changeless vegetable kingdom of the bogs. Though he expresses hope in some of his poems for a gradual lessening of Irish tensions, and though he has clearly worked hard to become a more international poet by translating passages from Dante, Virgil, and Aeschylus, the best of his later poems are, like the best of his early poems, intensely Irish, but more topical and less evocative, more prosaic and less poetic, and there are in this copious collection many more of the forgettable than of the memorable.