'Digging', by Heaney. No one ever wrote a more painfully banal and small-minded poem, or at least it is the most so I have ever read.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

Am I missing something? Has my taste for this queer artform of poetry not yet developed properly? I don't think the poem is relevant, and I certainly don't think it's beautiful. It's boring, moreso than it's subject itself. How did you manage, Heaney, to take in something as awesome as a concrete experience, and transform it into such plodding and aimless verse? Your poem thus amounts to nothing more than an insult to the beauty of reality itself.

For contrast, Stephen Connely:

I turned up early, bought you green tea
on a tip-off from a mutual friend, then watched
the familiar walls lose their shape, my heart
right there on the table, my coffee going cold.

You can see in this verse a kind of purpose. There are images too, creative images, not purely descriptive as in Heaney, and in art creation is more valuable than pure, unaltered representation. Connely's word-pictures have an element of surrealness in them, deformed walls surrounding an organ plucked from his own body; Heaney on the other hand has a particular talent for quelling the reader's imagination.

It would however be entirely unfair . I can't fairly characterise Heaney's entire opus merely by focusing on one of his failures. There is a certain measure of success in other poems:

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking.