Door into the Dark Paperback – 7 October 2002

I love everything about Seamus Heaney apart from the fact that he know longer walks this planet in the same form.

DOOR INTO THE DARK (1969) is Seamus Heaney's second book of poems. As with the first, "Death of a Naturalist", many of the poems have as their subject the rural life. For example: a forge and the blacksmith, stables, breeding a cow to a bull, a thatcher, a frozen outdoor water pump, and threshing. Some deal with fishing and eeling, notably the beguiling seven-poem "A Lough Neagh Sequence". A few deal with Ireland and one, my favorite, with Irish history. That is "Requiem for the Croppies", which I here set out:The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley --No kitchens on the run, no striking camp --We moved quick and sudden in our own country.The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.A people, hardly marching -- on the hike --We found new tactics happening each day:We'd cut through reins and rider with the pikeAnd stampede cattle into infantry,Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.They buried us without shroud or coffinAnd in August the barley grew up out of the grave.Though of the thirty-four poems, there is only one other sonnet, most of the poems are formal and many employ rhyme. That is one reason I take to Heaney. Another is that he writes about people and human activity (rather than abstractions or metaphysics), and hence his poems are easily understood.

Great work from a great poet -sadly missed -some of his early work is his best and can appeal to a global audience even though the themes are mainly irish

Superb read by a master

Good early poems from Seamus Heaney but not up to the standard of his very first offering Death of a Naturalist, so not as rewarding a read.