SOURCE: A review of History Lessons, in World Literature Today, Vol. 58, No. 4, Autumn, 1984, p. 608.

In the following review, Keefe focuses on the emergence of a distinct persona in the poems of History Lessons.

Seamus Deane is a distinguished member of a literary movement that has emerged from the North of Ireland and has the "Troubles" of the last few decades as its mainspring. His third book of poems, History Lessons, continues the poet's quest for an answer to the intolerable burden of history and the bloody explosions it fuels. The poems are wrought with tension and a nervosity that in the personal lyrics occasionally tend to overwhelm that fragile form. In "Breaking Wood," however, there is an autumnal resignation as the poem moves serenely and surely to a memorable conclusion.

Two poems in an assured and commanding voice stand out as examples of a direction Deane is creatively...