Field Work

First edition. 8vo. 64 pp. Chocolate brown cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. In brown and orange dustjacket, printed in white (priced £3.00 net to front flap).

Poetry Book Society Bulletin (No. 102: Autumn 1979), with Heaney's short essay about the poems, laid in. Notoriously prone to fading to dustjacket spine, this remains an exceptionally sharp copy.

Poetry Book Society Choice. Author's fifth volume of poetry, a collection of elegies and love poems, it contains Heaney's justly celebrated "Glanmore Sonnets", named after the hamlet in Co. Wicklow, where the poet settled for four years, having left the turbulence of Belfast in 1972. Shortly before its publication, he wrote to Brian Friel that he "no longer wanted a door into the dark" but "a door into the light."

That turning towards the light – leaving behind the incessant funeral rites in North (1975), heralded a new preoccupation with clarity, vision, and self-definition in his poetry, ushering in a reappraisal of the role of the poet during the "Troubles". Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. "[T]his is a book we cannot do without." –Guardian

[Randall, James. 1979. "An Interview with Seamus Heaney." Ploughshares, 5 (3): 7–22; Brandes & Durkan A20a]