Heaney's North is the hardest thing he wrote and the one that matters

Published in 1975, in the middle of the Troubles, and immediately contentious. It remains the collection Heaney is most defended and most attacked for.

The device

Bog bodies — Iron Age corpses preserved in peat, some of them apparently ritually killed. Heaney uses them as a way of writing about sectarian violence without writing about it directly.

The argument against the book is that this aestheticises killing, placing contemporary murder in a mythic frame that makes it seem inevitable. That criticism is serious and Heaney took it seriously.

The poem to start with

Punishment. It looks at a bog body, then turns to the present, and ends with the poet admitting his own complicity — that he would have stood by and said nothing. It is one of the few political poems in English that indicts its own author.

Whether you accept the poem’s honesty or read it as evasion is the argument. It is worth having.

The language

Dense, consonantal, physical. Heaney writes about digging, about earth, about tools, and the sound of the poems is deliberately heavy in the mouth. Read it aloud; it changes completely.

The practical note

Not a first poetry book. If you have read some, this is where you go to see what the form can do with a political emergency. Around 70 pages.