Field Work: Faber Modern Classics

Seamus Heaney was ‘the greatest poet of our age’ (Guardian). From his remarkable debut in 1966, he pioneered the poetry of our times across five decades of cultural and political change, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Field Work, his fifth volume, from 1979, is a collection of poems that were among the finest he would ever write. Inspired by the four years that Heaney and his family spent in rural County Wicklow after leaving the violence of Belfast, Field Work is one of the poet’s most celebrated volumes.

The collection contains some of his best-loved poems, ‘Oysters’, ‘Casualty’, ‘The Otter’, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, and ‘The Skunk’, as well as his defining sequence ‘Glanmore Sonnets’.