By conjuring aspects of a shared Northern European experience - its peculiar landscapes and weathers, its sea-faring incursions, the vernaculars of its buried and living peoples - Heaney found a way of articulating a vision of Ireland in which the disruptions and violences of the Troubles could be reflected too.

'. . . it's the brilliant reconciliation of art with politics that sets North apart from the rest of Heaney's oeuvre and gives it a kind of dark majesty.' Robert McCrum, Guardian

'The seedtime of the soul and the dissolution of the flesh melt equally into history, exhumed only temporarily in Heaney's penetrating vision, where gravity and preservation unite.' Helen Vendler, New York Times