North (poetry)
First edition
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| Author | Seamus Heaney |
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| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
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Publication date
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1975 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 73 |
| Awards | 1975 Duff Cooper Prize |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | Wintering Out |
| Followed by | Field Work |
North (1975) is a collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first of his works that directly dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it looks frequently to the past for images and symbols relevant to the violence and political unrest of that time. Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.
The collection is divided into two parts of which the first is more symbolic, dealing with themes such as the Greek myth of Antaeus, the bog bodies of Northern Europe, Vikings, and other historical figures. The second, shorter part contains poems that deal more specifically with life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles and contains dedicatory poems to Michael McLaverty and Seamus Deane.
The title of the volume may come from a poem in the volume; however, while the manuscript drafts reveal other titles Heaney considered for the poem, no evidence exists that he ever considered a different title for the volume. Rand Brandes writes, “North was always North”. The poem “North” invokes one of the volume’s primary symbols—the Viking raiders who invaded Ireland between 795 and 980. The volume title also suggests these northern raiders, the bog bodies found in Northern Europe, and most significantly, the North of Ireland.
Bog bodies inspire four poems in this volume: “Bog Queen,” “The Grauballe Man,” “Punishment,” and “Strange Fruit.” In his previous volume, Wintering Out, Heaney published the first of his bog-body poems, “Tollund Man.” Heaney was inspired to write these poems after reading PV Glob’s book, The Bog People, an archeological study of Iron-Age bodies discovered in the bogs of Northern Europe. In his essay “Feeling Into Words,” Heaney explains that he found this book during a time when writing poetry had shifted for him “from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament”. The bog bodies of Glob’s book became such symbols for Heaney, who writes, “And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles”. In these poems, Heaney draws connections between the past and present.
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