Opened Ground: Poems, 1966-96 - First Edition, First Impression

Seamus Heaney

ISBN 10: 0571194923 / ISBN 13: 9780571194926

Published by Faber & Faber, London, 1998

About this Item

Book condition: Near Fine with date in red ink to front blank end-paper. Jacket: Near Fine with very light handling wear. First edition, first impression. A bright copy.

Seller Inventory # 017972

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Opened Ground: Poems, 1966-96 - First Edition, First Impression
• Publisher: Faber & Faber, London
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571194923
• ISBN 13: 9780571194926
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • First Editions
  • Poetry
  • Irish Interest

About this title

Synopsis

An updated version of Seamus Heaney's "New Selected Poems 1966-1987", which has been expanded to include work from two subsequent collections, "Seeing Things" and the award-winning "The Spirit Level", as well as poems not previously published.

Review

For Seamus Heaney, "opened ground" is a necessity--a way of getting to the root of things. The book bearing that name spans three decades, beginning with "Digging," his exhilarating portrait of the artist as a young revolutionary. "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun," Heaney boasts (although by the end of the poem, his weapon has metamorphosed into something closer to the spade his grandfather and father once relied upon). The last entry, the sonnet "Postscript," appears some 400 pages later, which makes Opened Ground a capacious selection of his work. But at this point Heaney requires the largest of hold-alls. There are beautiful, pastoral lyrics here, sequences such as "Glanmore Sonnets" and "Clearances," and a multitude of love poems, not solely to his wife but to his parents and children. And in Heaney's hands, small domestic moments and objects--a scrabble board, a swing, a kite, a bed sawn in half to get it downstairs--invariably become both reality and soaring myth.

At the same time, his Ireland is the site of "neighborly murders," and the past and larger world he confronts is one threatened by history and brutal sectarianism. Heaney has declared, "Fear is the emotion that the muse thrives on. That's always there"--and terror is pervasive in his "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, / Of open minds as open as a trap." Many of his poems that explore the Troubles reflect his own considerable concern that he has long "confused evasion and artistic tact." Others might be termed self-reflexive, since Heaney uses them to unearth his own role. "Kinship" features a simple, brilliant (not to mention canine!) simile:

I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat.

In a later poem, "From the Frontier of Writing," he compares the struggle for inspiration to being stopped at a roadblock: "And everything is pure interrogation / until a rifle motions you and you move / with guarded unconcerned acceleration." Heaney's gift is dazzling, and would be almost unbearable were it not matched by vigilance, self-doubt, and regret--and his longing for the day in which "justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme." --Kerry Fried