Originally published in 1969, Seamus Heaney's second collection, Door into the Dark, pushes further into territory so startlingly opened up in Death of a Naturalist (1966). These are poems that take us back to the poet's rural upbringing and to a place defined by its shores and waterways, its unfenced and bottomless boglands. It is a landscape known intimately by the people and creatures who work it - the farmer, the thatcher, the fishermen and eels of Lough Neagh - and by Heaney himself who, like the blacksmith he also invokes, 'expends himself in shapes and music', forging poems whose physicality and sensuousness will prove to be hallmarks of his utterly distinctive writing.
