-More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of.- John Carey
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.
