“[Heaney] gives the double impression that nothing gets lost in the translation of the world into poetry, and that it is only through the poetry that the world to which it refers comes fully into existence . . . His is an earth that speaks directly and in recognition to the body. It is without even the vestige of alienation. At the root of every word there is a tentacular handshake between the speaker and the thing spoken of.” —Seamus Deane, Times Literary Supplement

“Mr. Heaney's patch, of course, is Ireland--its present turmoil and mutilated native culture, within a topography of farmland, rock, and omnipresent bog that preserves, like memory, the 'perishable treasure' of its past. Associated, too, with his growth as a poet is the anomaly of Mr. Heaney's rural Roman Catholic origin in Protestant Northern Ireland . . . Certainly no contemporary poet has taken his role more seriously, or sought more assiduously to define the area of his responsibility. By electing to open Selected Poems 1966-1987 with 'Digging'--a sign-post indicating the direction his future would take--and to put 'The Mud Vision' at the end, Mr. Heaney himself provides a trustworthy guide to his underworld . . . Since the poems in this volume are arranged chronologically, the reader is encouraged to follow, book by book, the 'stations' of the poet's 'dig.' With an archaeologist's deftness, he excavates his roots--now personal, now lost in the turf of saga, myth, and history, yet sensitive always to the claims of equivalent language.” —Anne Stevenson, The New York Times Book Review