Land – the four green fields of Ireland – is where the symbolism, languages, history, cultures and experience of Irishness converge. The inherited boundaries of ownership, kinship and work culture meet in the land; it is the locus of identity, community, conflict and belonging, and lingers like a red mist in the rebel soul of the emigrant or exile; it is the mood music of the songs and poetry of the Irish peoples. Seamus Heaney was a farmer’s boy, and his break-through poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), was a dissection of the myths, those old un-dislodged stories and ways of feeling about the nature of belonging to the land that always did amount to trouble. more