A Craftsman's Fascination With Agricultural Implements

NYT has a very nice review of Seamus Heaney's new book of poems, District and Circle. The author, Brad Leithauser, explains that:

From the onset of his career, Heaney has shown a craftsman's fascination with agricultural implements: spades, plows, pumps, hammers. "District and Circle" extends this preoccupation ("The Turnip-Snedder," "The Harrow-Pin," "Súgán"). Some of the book's most memorable moments have the stray, startling illuminations of sparks thrown off a forge, as in "A Shiver," about a sledgehammer:

The way you had to heft and then half-rest
Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage
About to be let fly: does it do you good
To have known it in your bones, directable,
Withholdable at will,
A first blow that could make air of a wall,
A last one so unanswerably landed
The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?

Leithauser captures nicely what it is that I appreciate most about Heaney's poems:

His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say.