ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney explores Irelands boglands in the late 1960s together with his friend the Irish painter T. P. Flanagan. Heaney's early bog poems highlights the bogs' peculiarity and value as unique and unusual natural environments. Heaney's first poem about bogs, 'Bogland' balances cultural and natural history by placing human culinary objects next to animal relics. Human geographer Dianne Meredith discusses the relationship between the physical landscape of the bog and its representation in Heaney's poems. Her analysis in the essay 'Landscape or Mindscape? Seamus Heaney's Bogs' provides important stepping-stone in the chapter. Most of Heaney's bog poems appeared as a series of poems placed in the middle of North, describing several well-preserved ancient bodies recovered from bogs: 'Come to the Bower', 'Bog Queen', 'The Grauballe Man', 'Punishment', 'Strange Fruit' and 'Kinship'. The first bog body portrayed by Heaney in a poem is 'the Tollund man', an unusually well preserved bog body recovered from bogs in an area in Denmark called Jutland.
