Hand and Foot

John Kerrigan

  • Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96 by Seamus Heaney
    Faber, 478 pp, £20.00, September 1998, ISBN 0 571 19492 3
  • The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study by Neil Corcoran
    Faber, 276 pp, £9.99, September 1998, ISBN 0 571 17747 6
  • Seamus Heaney by Helen Vendler
    HarperCollins, 188 pp, £15.99, November 1998, ISBN 0 00 255856 4

When Seamus Heaney left Belfast in 1972, to work as a freelance writer in the relative safety of the Republic, Northern Ireland was a war zone. Internment and Bloody Sunday had recruited so many to the Provisional IRA that Civil Rights marches had given way to carbombs. While Heaney in County Wicklow wrote the poems that would go into North, common ground was eroded. Moderates still hoped for power-sharing, but the prospects for compromise were damaged in February 1973, when the Loyalist Association of Workers called a general strike – flexing the industrial muscle which would later destroy the Sunningdale Agreement.

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