Heaney's most controversial and most celebrated collection. He uses the "bog bodies" of Iron Age Denmark (preserved in peat, often victims of ritual sacrifice) as metaphors for the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The poems are extraordinary acts of historical imagination: the political violence of the present read through the preserved violence of two thousand years ago. "Punishment" remains one of the most debated poems in 20th-century Irish literature.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.