When Seamus Heaney prepared Opened Ground it came as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as the author cared to make it. The edition draws from four decades of Seamus Heaney's verse, together with examples of his work as a translator, from his scintillating debut, Death of a Naturalist, to The Spirit Level, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year. The book concludes with 'Crediting Poetry', the speech with which Seamus Heaney accepted the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, for his 'works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth'. Opened Ground remains the most comprehensive edition of his work that Seamus Heaney ever made.