Bog bodies surface from the peat, their throats cut in ritual sacrifice, and a poet in Belfast recognizes their faces. Seamus Heaney published this collection in 1975, at the bloodiest point of the Troubles, and found in Iron Age Denmark a mirror for Irish violence: the same tribal memory, the same terrible intimacy between land and death. The poems are dense, consonantal, heavy as turned earth. Heaney digs into etymology and archaeology alike, unearthing a language for atrocity that neither condemns from a safe distance nor forgives too easily. The verse moves between the ancient and the immediate with the authority of a man who grew up where digging was the first metaphor. To go north is to go down into the dark ground of history.