Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney

This is a collection of Heaney's poetry spanning some forty years of his writing career, and my current bed-time reading. I found it while browsing in the bookshop for some books that I needed for my studies and just had to have it.

Heaney is an Irish poet who writes beautifully. His poems often present history, the writer's Irish homeland, and rural living, and do so in wonderful English. None of the poems that I have read so far have a single obscure or unusual word; every word is the sort of word you'd use everyday and yet Heaney manages to stick them together in ways that are sometimes ambiguous despite the clarity of the language, and that always sound almost like music. Heaney has that ability to express complex ideas with simple language, which I personally like in a poem. Not every meaning or message is clear; not a single poem is dull or follows a set formula. Heaney clearly has an ear for the music of words and ideas and a deft touch with concise but startlingly accurate choice of language.

There are so many poems to love in this book, it is impossible to choose my favourite, but if I really had to, I would say that The Haw Lantern and The Bog Queen come close. But perhaps the one poem that actually left me lost for breath, such was its quiet power, was a couplet simply entitled 'For Bernard and Jane McCabe'. Find it on the internet if you can. If you only read poetry occasionally, this poem is an occasion. It is the best couplet I have ever read, and shows just how good a simple two-line poem can be when it is given the magic touch of poetic genius.

Perhaps what I like best about Heaney's work is its natural and rural subject matter, imagery and mood. Maybe if I had been born in the city I wouldn't be able to identify with it so much. But I'm a country lass and for me the poems included in 'Opened Ground' evoke all the rugged, untamed beauty of nature and the landscape I love. 10/10.