And the archaeologist's tools are of use not just on the national and political level, but in discussing the inner life of the poet himself. In several poems Heaney describes an incident from his youth or a Yeatsian encounter with a stranger, and then shows how this core event has continued to shape his consciousness.

In many of his earlier works, particularly, Heaney shows a fascination with the metaphor of archaeology. In poems selected from his books Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), he deals at length with the "bog people," prehistoric humans whose bodies scientists have recovered, almost perfectly preserved, from peat bogs in Denmark. These long-buried victims of "tribal, intimate revenge" become symbols of the collective subconscious of their modern descendants.

Here and in many others of Heaney's poems, body and land are one: the undersoil is richly strewn with bits of bone from people who have lived and died in the past. "Bone Dreams" (1975) recalls the Song of Solomon, as the bodies of the poet and his lover merge into the landscape:

...I am screes

on her escarpments,

a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.

And like Greek gods who were the very rivers and streams they represented in myth, language itself is an inextricable, physical feature of Heaney's pagan world. This takes on a literal dimension in "Alphabets" (1987), where the letter A is "two rafters and a cross-tie" and the number 2 "a swan's neck and a swan's back."

In a more general sense, too, Heaney's language is like his landscape. His sentences are earthy and declarative; they have the tones of a farmer talking to his neighbor across the stone fence. The vocabulary is stoutly native, rich with Anglo-Saxon nouns whose vowels are strong and round as the hillsides. And, once again the archaeologist, Heaney mines the forgotten caves of English to exhume fine words in their last stage of decay, words like bleb and rath and coign, words shaped in the mouths of Beowulf and Cuchulain.

There is much in this book that is profound, but little that trumpets itself as such. There is little precarious and showy piling of image on image, few abstruse allusions and fancy metaphysical dance-steps. Rather, there is every-where the easy, sure-footed gait of a writer at home in his native tongue and native place.