[In the following essay, Pinsky provides a favorable review of Field Work.]

The poems of Seamus Heaney give several kinds of pleasure: first of all, he is a talented writer, with a sense of language and rhythm as clean, sweet, and solid as newworked hardwood. Beyond that, his previous book, North, showed inspiringly that his talent had the limberness and pluck needed to take up some of the burden of history—the tangled, pained history of Ireland. Heaney's success in dealing with the murderous racial enmities of past and present, avoiding all the sins of oratory, and keeping his personal sense of balance, seems to me one of the most exhilarating poetic accomplishments in many years.

It is no real dispraise of Field Work to observe that it is a less original, less heroically stretched work than North. There is a distinct feeling of artistic Tightness about the relatively more measured qualities of these new poems: they present a less agonized manner, and a more actual Ireland, seen from closer to ground level.

In North, the English language was partly reinvented to emphasize words rooted in the tongues of the remote Scandinavian invaders, a thorny cadence and vocabulary of Germanic and Celtic parts jammed together, with Frenchified or Latinate bits floating in a calculated violent relation to the whole. And while an American reader's first mental picture of Northern Ireland may be (by virtue of television) grimly urban, Heaney's speech in North was rooted in farmland and fen. When, in the first sentence of "Come to the Bower," the poet reach es into the peat soil that mummifies the past and sustains the present, the language he uses corresponds to the physical action:

My hands come, touched
By sweetbriar and-the tangled vetch,
Foraging past the burst gizzards
Of coin-hoards

To where the dark-bowered queen,
Whom I unpin,
Is waiting.

The freshness of the idiom seems openly made out of something like archaeological discovery: each word ("forage," "vetch," "gizzards") set to suggest that the flecks of dark, rich mold have just been brushed from it.

In Field Work, the characteristic gestures seem less intuitive and sensory, more direct and prosaic. When the poet asks the Sibyl, "What will become of us?" she begins her answer in a suitably grave, prophetic way: "I think our very form is bound to change./ Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires./ Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice.'" This in itself confirms that the title Field Work denotes (among other things) an outward, daylit kind of attention; and the Sibyl's conclusion touches an even more prosaic level:

'My people think money
And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future
On single acquisitive terms. Silence
Has shoaled into the trawlers' echosounders.

The ground we kept our ear to for so long
Is flayed or calloused, and its entrails
Tented by an impious augury.
Our island is full of comfortless noises.'

Of course, this speech is not in the poet's own voice; and it is one of the most explicitly public and civic passages in this volume. But just the same, the passage exemplifies Heaney's "field" in these poems, some of them elegies for the victims of civil troubles.

In the affecting poem "Casualty," one such victim blunders into a pub that is blown up, on a night he decides to defy an IRA curfew—or rather, to ignore the curfew, because he is stubborn, and likes to drink. In a bar out of his own neighborhood, he is "blown to bits" by the side that is more or less "his": killed more or less by accident, through having needed to be himself, as naturally as a fish.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming toward the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses.
In the gregarious smoke.

The sad comedy of this picture—the doomed man (who once took the poet fishing) as a fish, the pub as a net—embodies what is best about these poems: Heaney's sense of individual human character as not at all heroic, but somehow glorious, in its persistence.

Heaney's description of the casualty ("I loved his whole manner") perhaps strikes, glancingly, a small note of selfportraiture: "Sure-footed but too sly,/ His deadpan sidling tact,/His fisherman's quick eye/And turned observant back." The tact, the sure-footedness, and most of all the "turned observant back," all suggest the way Field Work hails its materials: an agile attention, too reserved for the front-squared gaze of the journalistic.

I have dwelled, somewhat misleadingly, on the role of Northern Ireland in Heaney's work, because national matters seem to provide the most immediately available examples of his accomplishments. Perhaps those matters have impelled him to his accomplishments. But it is a strength of the volume as a whole that not all of its poems are concerned with the stresses of Ireland (though the stresses for an Irish artist born in the North are never distant, in Field Work, for long).

There is, for instance, a genial, untamed sensuality in the poems, winningly countered by Heaney's shrewd comic sense. In a pretty, small poem ("The Guttural Muse"), the country accents of teenagers leaving a bucolic "discotheque" rise up to his hotel room: voices and accents "thick and comforting/ As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up." The slime of the tench, the poem mentions, is said to cure wounds on other fish—and then, there is a girl in a white dress, "being courted out among the cars": "As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs/I felt like some old pike all badged with sores/Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life." I enjoy the sense of Heaney's particular, complicated personality here, especially as it grins at itself: the homely, pragmatic grotesqueness of the metaphor; the way an erotic moment comes spinning into his imagination out of a glimpse of white dress and, most characteristically, out of a local form of speech.

Perhaps the center of Field Work is the sequence, "Glanmore Sonnets"; in one set of terms, these poems are about living in a rural cottage for a time. The poems are pastoral: "The mildest February for twenty years," says the first sonnet: "Now the good life could be to cross a field/And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe/Of ploughs." But it is a disturbed, in fact a haunted pastoral, as the last lines of the same sonnet acknowledge: "Breasting the mist, in sower's aprons,/My ghosts come striding into their spring stations./The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows."

The "Glanmore Sonnets" play the dark, pre-Norman sounding diction of North ("Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense") in a comic way against Latin and French roots, which in self-parody are made to seem mincing and affected. In one sonnet, the poet begins to muse upon a comparison of himself and his companion with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, in their country retreat—a comparison briskly dismissed by the woman. On the way to his literary-biographical venture, the poet writes two Unes, using such Latinate and/or French diction, that are quite funny in context: about some sundown birdsongs, "It was all crepuscular and iambic"; and about some deer, "Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air."

This bantering lyricism, like the idea of writing a sequence of actual sonnets, presents a particularly un-American side of Heaney. A prosodist and a humanist, he seems to incorporate a literary element into his work without embarrassment, apology, or ostentation. I think that such a sense of other writing—that is, of "literature"—as just one more resource may come less freely to many American poets of Heaney's age (around 40).

Having said that, I will admit that there are times when some of these poems do seem literary in a pejorative sense. One might use that word for an occasional stale, bardic note ("Everything in me/Wanted to…" etc.). And when the "boortree," another name for "elderberry," turns out to be a form of "bowertree," the poem made out of all that word-worrying seems held together too much by will and by learning—not helped by a self-apostrophe as "etymologist of roots and graftings." But these lapses don't matter much in a book of so much grace, generosity, wit, and seriousness.

Field Work ends with a translation, the Ugolino material from the Inferno. It's a marvelous job, in idiomatic, but forcefully compressed language, and lines of loose, rhymed pentameter. The story of unquenchable anger ends with Dante's execration on the city of Pisa. In the context of Seamus Heaney's last two books, the passage is also a kind of admonition, a minatory urging of forgiveness as well as a curse. It recalls the Sibyl's prediction of cannibalism ("Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires,") "Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice":

Pisa! Pisa, your sounds are like a hiss
Sizzling in our country's grassy language.
And since the neighbor states have been remiss
In your extermination, let a huge
Dyke of islands bar the Arno's mouth, let
Capraia and Gorgona dam and deluge
You and your population. For the sins
Of Ugolino, who betrayed your forts,
Should never have been visited on his sons.
Your atrocity was Theban. They were young
And innocent: Hugh and Brigata
And the other two whose names are in my song.

Historical, and yet concluding with the particularity of individual names; as coolly detached as a "turned back," and yet as intense as their language—these translated lines, and the sure instinct to put them as concluding words, are another measure of Heaney's art.