What the critics say

On Heaney’s Field Work

Critic	Interpretation	Use it to argue…
Neil Corcoran	The volume holds ‘in the same balance the song of possible reconciliation and the memorial lament’.	that the book’s achievement is a held tension, not a resolution.
Neil Corcoran	‘The end of art is peace’ is offered ‘not as discovery… but as fragile aspiration’.	that Heaney hopes for peace rather than claiming it.
R. F. Foster	‘If one preoccupation of his work in the later 1970s is love, the other is death.’	that love and elegy are the book’s twin engines.
Joshua Weiner	‘Casualty’ leaving its victim unnamed ‘underscores the way that violence pulls even those who have no designated role onto the stage of history’.	that anonymity widens a private death into a public one.
Christopher Ricks	‘The Skunk’ is ‘an exquisitely comic love-poem’ built on trust.	that Heaney’s marriage poems risk comedy and win tenderness.
Michael Thurston	Heaney weaves ‘personal experience, literary allusion, and historical significance’ so one death ‘might ramify’.	that the elegies work by layering the private and the historical.
Andrew Green	‘The earth… becomes the preserver of memory.’	that Heaney’s landscape stores the past like a bog.

On Sheers’s Skirrid Hill

Critic	Interpretation	Use it to argue…
Sarah Crown	The cloven Skirrid is ‘the metaphor that unites his second collection’; its ‘ruptured terrain reflects the collection’s fractured emotional landscape’.	that the split hill governs every separation in the book.
Catriona Coutts	‘Nearly all the poems end with the lover leaving, or with the poet alone, looking back on a shared time.’	that parting is the book’s structural habit.
Jonathan Edwards	In ‘Winter Swans’ the swans ‘become… a metaphor for the lovers’.	that nature models the reconciliation the couple cannot speak.
Carrie Etter	‘Mametz Wood’ keeps the soldiers anonymous, focusing on ‘the relationship between the earth and their bones’.	that the war poem chooses the universal over the individual.
Thomas Church	Sheers’s subject is ‘the permanent impact of impermanent moments’.	that fleeting relationships leave lasting marks.
John Hathaway	Planting a tree, or raising a child, is ‘a radical act of faith in the future’.	that the family poems set continuity against loss.

The poets in their own words

‘This was poetry that didn’t so much write about landscape as from within it.’ Owen Sheers, on poetry and place

Sheers also insists ‘trust the poem, not the poet’: useful for arguing that his meanings live in the images, not in his biography. Heaney, looking back on the turn Field Work represents, said he ‘no longer wanted a door into the dark… I want a door into the light’, and wished to use ‘the first person singular to mean me and my lifetime’. Set his own account against the poems: does the book feel like a move into the light, or does the dark keep coming back?