Field Work can largely be read as record of Heaney’s four years (1972-1976) living in rural County Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland after leaving the violence of The Troubles.

I find that if I have a working title at that stage – say when half a volume is in existence – the title itself can help in shaping, or at least inclining and suggesting, the poems to come.”[6] In a review for The New York Times, O’Donoghue called Field Work: “a superb book, the most eloquent and far-reaching book he has written, a perennial poetry offered at a time when many of us have despaired of seeing such a thing.

In an interview with Henri Cole in the Fall 1997 volume of The Paris Review, Heaney describes this collection: "But even if Field Work was less obsessive, more formally rangy, full of public elegies and personal love poems and those Glanmore sonnets, it was still a proof that I could write poetry in my new situation."

"[7] In the same interview, Heaney also said: “I tried very deliberately in Field Work to turn from a broody, phonetically self-relishing kind of writing to something closer to my own speaking voice.

In the New York Review of Books, Al Alvarez calls Heaney an “intensely literary writer” and writes that the “reticence and self-containment” seen in North are not present in Field Work."

Alvarez commented: “In the circumstances, his current reputation amounts, I think, to a double betrayal: it lumbers him with expectations which he may not fulfill and which might even sink him, if he were less resilient; at the same time, it reinforces the British audience in their comfortable prejudice that poetry, give or take a few quirks of style, has not changed essentially in the last hundred years.