Volume 28, Number 15 · October 8, 1981
Digging In
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
Poems 1965-1975
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 228 pp., $6.95 (paper)
A Coast of Trees: Poems
by A.R. Ammons
W.W. Norton, 52 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Selected Poems
by Mark Strand
Atheneum, 152 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Only the most gifted poets can start from their peculiar origin in a language, a landscape, a nation, and from these enclosures rise to impersonal authority. Seamus Heaney has this kind of power, and it appears constantly in his Poems 1965-1975. One may enter his poetry by a number of paths, but each joins up with the others. Nationality becomes landscape; landscape becomes language; language becomes genius.
Review, 3530 words
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