It was the first of his works that directly dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it looks frequently to the past for images and symbols relevant to the violence and political unrest of that time.

The collection is divided into two parts of which the first is more symbolic, dealing with themes such as the Greek myth of Antaeus, the bog bodies of Northern Europe, Vikings, and other historical figures.

In his essay "Feeling Into Words", Heaney explains that he found this book during a time when writing poetry had shifted for him "from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament".

"Punishment" is a bog poem written to Windeby I. Heaney's voice is one of a voyeur, imagining the past life of a girl who was hung for adultery.

After a description that enlivens the bog body, the poem culminates with Heaney addressing the paralyzing emotional experience of being a voyeur to such "tribal, intimate revenge".

Helen Vendler, for example, labeled it "One of the few unforgettable single volumes published in English since the modernist era"[5] and later as "one of the crucial poetic intervention of the twentieth century".

[citation needed] Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote, "I had the uncanny feeling, reading these poems, of listening to the thing itself, the actual substance of historical agony and dissolution, the tragedy of a people in a place: the Catholics of Northern Ireland".

[6] Seamus Deane also responded positively to the volume, finding that the poems "interrogate the quality of the relationship between the poet and his mixed political and literary tradition".

In his review, he writes, "Everyone was anxious that North should be a great book; when it turned out it wasn't, it was treated as one anyway, and made into an Ulster '75 Exhibition of the Good that can come out of Troubled Times.

[10] Because of this, Carson saw Heaney in this volume as "the laureate of violence--a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for 'the situation,' in the last resort, a mystifier".