In 1938, not a moment too soon, W.B. Yeats admonished his colleagues: "Irish poets, learn your trade." Seamus Heaney, born the following year, has learned his trade so well that it is now a second nature wonderfully responsive to his first. And the proof is in "Field Work," a superb book, the most eloquent and far-reaching book he has written, a perennial poetry offered at a time when many of us have despaired of seeing such a thing.  Heaney published his first book of poems, "Death of a Naturalist," in 1966. It was a book of promise, and of promises made mostly to his father, family, race and country. A local book, in the sense that our household gods are local. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh encouraged Heaney to believe that Homer made the Iliad from a local quarrel, and that themes of parishes, villages and townlands may be turned into poetry by the right tune. So Heaney wrote of digging potatoes, cutting turf, eating blackberries, churning milk, plowing, a child's death, young love, water-divining, Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, but mostly of "the sure green world." In his second book, "Door Into the Dark" (1969), the dark is a blacksmith's forge, to begin with, and then the other forms of darkness that shadow the security of earth, time and the seasons. One poem speaks of "the smells of ordinariness." The art of poetry is likened to other arts, including thatching and smithery. In a few poems the young poet's veins bulge more than the occasion warrants, but mostly the rhetoric is true, well-earned. The poet in these two books is walking the land, training his eyes, getting the measure of things right. Landscapes are tactfully moralized, pressed to disclose values and meanings so gracefully reasonable that they hardly need pressure at all, only a few of Heaney's "time-turned words."  "Bogland," the last poem in "Door Into the Dark," made a new promise, that Heaney would go further, dig more deeply into Ireland's past. Bog is the only unfenced country in Ireland, a land without prairies, where the eye meets the horizon when it has scanned a few fields. In his next book, "Wintering Out" (1973), Heaney included some political and civic poems, mainly about the competence in pain you acquire by living in it -- he was still writing in the North of Ireland and pondering its "little destiny" -- but the most far-reaching poems reached down into the bog and magma of the country. His immediate source was P.V. Glob's "The Bog People," an extraordinary account of the bodies that remained intact or a thousand years or more, protected by the bogland of Aarhus. In "Wintering Out" and his next book, "North" (1976), Heaney has several poems that give not the history of a sentiment but its archeology.  It is my understanding that in "North" Heaney draws up on the long perspective of an ancient buried race to release himself from the appalling syntax of modern Irish history. Here are a few poems, such as "Whatever You Say Say Nothing," in which there is no perspective and therefore no respite. The scene is Belfast, Heaney's town, where the only vantage points are held by soldiers. But the more typical, and indeed the richer poems, take the long view of the dead, going down through the dictions, fossils, quernstones, Norse, Viking -- evidence you read like braille. In "Viking Dublin" Heaney writes of "a worm of thought I follow into the mud." And then:  I am Hamlet the Dane, skull-handler, parablist, smeller of rot in the state, infused with its poisons, pinioned by ghosts and affections, murders and pieties, coming to consciousness by jumping in graves, dithering, blathering.  In the deepest poems Heaney's feeling is "lost, unhappy, at home."  In 1970 Heaney went to California for a year, and also, I assume, for release from the violence of life in Belfast. He listened to new poetic voices: Robert Duncan and Gary Snyder, mainly. When he went back to Belfast it was assumed that he would become the spokesman, in poetry, for the Catholics, his own people. Instead, he left the North, gave up his job at Queen's University, went South to live with his wife and children in a cottage at Glanmore, County Wicklow. Some of his readers thought the move a capitulation, if not treachery, but Heaney had enough Northern wisdom to know that a poet pays a price for the thrill of being a spokesman. He heeded "an early warning system telling me to get back inside my own head." He spent four years in rural Wicklow, years of retreat only in the religious or monastic sense, a quiet time for thinking and renewal. Certain themes were sequestered, so that Heaney might start out again from first principles and deep affiliations.
Readers who want Heaney to go on writing political poems may be disappointed with Field Work. They may tell him to leave the fields and return to the streets. The advice is redundant.