Field Work

Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding 'an early warning system to get back inside my own head,' Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field Work he 'brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world' (Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).