North by Seamus Heaney (1975)

Pull a body from a peat bog and it comes up two thousand years intact: skin tanned to leather, the noose still at the throat, an Iron Age sacrifice the earth refused to let rot. Seamus Heaney went to those Jutland bogs looking for a way to write about Belfast, and what he found was that the dead keep. _North_ lays the murdered of Northern Ireland into the same ground as Norse raiders and ritual victims, treating the bog as a memory bank that gives back exactly what was buried in it: tribal violence, performed and re-performed across millennia. The poems are close-worked and consonant-heavy, the language packed like wet turf, every line digging. In "Punishment" he stands over a girl drowned for adultery in the Iron Age and admits he would understand the IRA's tarred and shaven women too, that to see this deep is to be complicit. The title points north to Jutland and north to Ulster at once, and will not choose.