North is the latest collection of verse by Ireland's most significant living poet. The theme is Ireland, but in a new regional and particularly temporal sense. North works less as bleak geographical than as bleaker historical force: from the Vikings of Dublin to the retributive Ulstermen wreaking atrocities in the present…. Ritual brings on and legitimizes the round of punishings. Individual and tribal deaths surface in this secret and retentive landscape, where the poet steps "through origins" "kinned by hieroglyphic peat" and reverses Yeat's line: "This centre holds."

More than coherence of place, there's coherence of action. Action is the key to Heaney's poetics. "'Description is revelation,'" yes. But this means here the imaginative retrieval of place, objects and people, and then the naming of these and their movement toward expression. This must be the direction for the modern lyric, away from the reflexive indulgence of "poets...