Seamus Heaney was a great poet from Ireland who died this year. What I like about this book of his early poems is that he wrote several poems about the Bog People. These are bodies from thousands of years ago that have been preserved in the peat. When I was 7 years old we never went abroad on holiday but rather randomly we went to Denmark. I was taken to see Tollund Man in the town of Aarhus. They think that his throat was slit in a ritual sacrifice and that he was thrown into a bog. The same year that I went to Denmark, Seamus Heaney was writing a poem about Tollund Man. It's on page 31 of the book. As a scientist, I'd be radio-carbon dating the man. I'd study him objectively. What I love about poetry is that it offers an emotional response. I look for objective facts. He tells me what Tollund Man means to him subjectively. It's just a different way of studying life. Seamus Heaney was from a part of Ireland that cut peat for fuel. He uses the poem to draw parallel with the peat areas of Jutland in Denmark. He then seems to me to reflect on the violence in Ireland at that time. Borrow the book. Read that poem and other ones about the bogs eg Grauballe Man on page 69.
