North
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.
Multiple readers call the collection’s tone monotonous straight through, one review summing it up in three words: “The tone is monotonous.” Part I, the historical bog-body poems that open the book, gets singled out as noticeably harder to follow than Part II’s more direct Troubles poems, with one reader stating flatly, “I found Part I much more opaque than Part II.” Other readers admit outright they don’t fully follow the poems on a first pass, and describe the collection as uneven poem to poem and unrelentingly dark without lighter material to offset the violence. The contemporary critical case runs harder: Ciaran Carson’s review accused Heaney of becoming “the laureate of violence,” mythologizing killing rather than confronting it, and Edna Longley made a related charge, that dressing the Troubles up as ancient bog-body myth “stylises and distances what was immediate and painful.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
