This new collection of his great work, at well over two inches thick, is 'great' in a workaday sense of the word, as well. That it might be called a “doorstop” is the kind of homely, conventional joke that would be more likely to amuse, rather than offend, Heaney’s many-minded imagination. His work is magnificent ... Amplifies a reader’s understanding of the poet’s accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating.
Seamus Heaney was a visionary bulwark against small-mindedness ... The Poems of Seamus Heaney definitively reveals the breadth and depth of Heaney’s accomplishment ... Here my gratitude to Heaney matches my thanks to his editors and his family, who have hatched this extraordinary book.
This edition also demonstrates how effectively he could strip out parts from one poem and recycle them more effectively into another. The 'uncollected' sections indicate how themes could be prepared, abandoned, stored, reused ... This edition brings us into the heart of Seamus Heaney’s own sanctum and shows the immense work as well as the inspiration behind the indisputably, miraculously 'real thing' he has left to us.
Reading this collected poems...becomes a process of finding echoes and associations, seeing images repeated and reconfigured ... Among the poems that have not been previously included in any volume are a few that are among Heaney’s best, but the main message we get from these and other early poems is how many different styles and poetic personae he tried out ... By the end of this book, the voice, Heaney’s voice, is almost wise, but rueful too, ready to credit 'the pain of loss before I know the term' as well as the marvels that have come before.
Heaney’s sheer industry and drive as a writer is on display in this volume, with the gathering together of many previously uncollected poems ... Six hundred pages of commentary provide context for the poems. Introductions to each collection are useful. But individual notes are often footling, occasionally unsourced, and frequently irrelevant ... Nevertheless, this vast collected poems demonstrates the magnitude of Heaney’s achievement in poetry. He maintained a staggeringly high strike rate of good poems throughout his long career.
The editors have taken the admirable decision to leave the published volumes intact, so that their careful ordering, something Heaney learned from Yeats, remains in place ... There are a surprising number of these uncollected poems, and what surprises too is the richness of these previously undisclosed seams ... What impresses is the consistency and the variety, coupled with the continuing ability to surprise us, for while Heaney always hugs the shore of tradition, he is not afraid to experiment, developing and deepening his craft.
Edited with meticulous care and luminous clarity ... This arrangement allows us to see Heaney’s oeuvre as a living, organic entity ... We have so many of the layers that make the experience of reading Heaney so rich ... He and his poetry were fit for the strain, and in these darkening times, his words help us to be so too.
