SOURCE: Desmond, John F. “Measures of a Poet.” America 181, no. 3 (31 July 1999): 24-5.

In the following review, Desmond outlines Heaney's career through the poems in Opened Ground.

In his 1995 Nobel Prize address, “Crediting Poetry,” Seamus Heaney defined lyric poetry as the creating of an order of reality that is both “true to the impact of external reality and … sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being.” Heaney's definition is self-revealing in that it expresses the basic tensions in his own poetry, his struggle to balance the grim actualities of history against the deeply felt impulses toward lyric delight.

Heaney's struggle, and his lifelong fidelity to both contending elements, is beautifully displayed in his newest collection, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, which contains representative poems from his 11 published volumes, an excerpt from his play The Cure at Troy and the Nobel Prize address. Heaney's titles are always percussively significant...