THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE

Seamus Heaney’s second book of prose, published in 1988, is a collection of critical essays scrutinising the work of several poets, Irish and British, American and European. His subjects exemplify Heaney’s own devotion to the art of poetry, particularly when faced with the gulf between artistic integrity and other responsibilities, both civic and moral. These characteristically lively and genial essays – examining work by the likes of Robert Lowell, Osip Mandelstam and Philip Larkin – remind their readers of Heaney’s gifts as a prose writer and, above all, of the gratifying nature of poetry itself.