Seamus Heaney (winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1995) gathered over 200 of his best poems in this collection, selected from twelve of his previous books of published poetry. The selection covers the period 1966 - 1996. It also contains his Nobel Lecture, "Crediting Poetry", since, as the author explains, "the ground covered in the lecture is ground originally opened by the poems which here precede it."