recite to a packed crowd an early poem that's among his most celebrated. "Digging" starts off tracing the poet's break from his sod-cutting father in Northern Ireland. The pen he holds as a gun in the opening lines suggests Heaney is a kind of stickup man at first, taking aim at his father for doing undignified work, which Heaney must "look down" on. And though digging makes "a clean rasping sound," the old man is a comic, almost feminized figure, "his straining rump among the flowerbeds."Digging
from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice
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