Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems, 1966-1987 is the second such compilation that the fifty-one-year-old Irish poet has published in the United States. Although the first, Poems, 1965-1975 (1980), claimed to be a complete gathering of the poems from Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), and North (1975)—Heaney’s first four books—this was not the case. Omitted were seven poems from Death of a Naturalist. This new volume, an acknowledged “selected,” excludes, in addition to the already-banished poems, the bulk of the early, Ted Hughes-inspired work from Heaney’s first two books. Gone too is a small group of political poems from the late Sixties that appeared in North. What remains is the decidedly apolitical, un-Ted Hughesian work of the last fifteen years, principally from Stations (1975), Field Work (1979), Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (1983), Station Island (1984), and The Haw Lantern (1987).

Heaney has a larger following in the United States than any Irish poet since Yeats. Given the suspicion in this country of foreign poets, this is no small feat. What makes Heaney’s acceptance here even more remarkable is that he doesn’t conform to the archetype of the exportable “bard,” what Louise Bogan once referred to as “the coat-trailing, charming, Irish semi-clown,” who sentimentalizes the Irish peasants. On the contrary, Heaney is a rootless modernist whose main goal as a poet is to express the plight of the contemporary, alienated sensibility.

The alienation that is expressed