The best single-volume introduction to Heaney's work, spanning Death of a Naturalist through The Spirit Level. It includes all the bog poems, the elegies, the Glanmore Sonnets, and the remarkable "Station Island" sequence (a Dantesque encounter with the shades of Irish literary history). Opened Ground shows the full arc of the greatest English-language poet since Larkin: his journey from the rural Catholic North to cosmopolitan Europe.

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