'These poems find – in the dowser's gift and the child's perception of the world – images of the marvellous that are also wonderfully grounded … Heaney is a poet who deserves to be read in entirety.' Jamie McKendrick, Independent on Sunday
'Virtuosity and truth, the one useless without the other, are the hallmarks of these poems … In the Nobel lecture he commends the achievement of Yeats, whose work does what the necessary poetry does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. It is a fair account of what he himself has done.' Frank Kermode, Sunday Times
'There are many sorts of poems here: love poems, family poems, farm poems, metaphysical poems, his ancient-grave poems, the medieval-modern outcasting king poems his Sweeniad … It's good to find fully represented the ones which tell you there is a civil war going on, which tell you about a divided community.' Karl Miller, Observer
