Although frequently identified as an Ulster Seamus Heaney not often read as someone who engages with the politics of Northern Ireland. His apparent disengagement has earned him both praise and vilification. W.J. McCormack points with perhaps undue censure to sentimental reading of his work whereby his evocation of that inattainable 'ordinary universe' taken as an endorsement of the simulacrum on sale in the classier shopping malls (35). Another reading presented most recently by Irish journalist Desmond Fennell criticizes him for his seeming refusal to espouse nationalist pieties. Neither of these readings, it seems to me, entirely incorrect. Heaney's work does constitute an implicit critique of certain aspects of nationalism, but not I suggest an outright rejection. If he evokes an ordinary or local universe, he offers it as a model or microcosm of that wider community the nation. Consequently, the present study reads Heaney as a nationalist poet, but one who reveals to us some of the complexity of his tradition. Before proceeding to an account of Heaney's poetry, however, it necessary to provide a brief discussion of some aspects of nationalism, in particular its role in the emergence of the post-colonial state. The colonial experience can be characterized, albeit reductively, as a double moment; initially, political and cultural imposition by an external power gives rise to a sense of overwhelming loss, displacement or amnesia. Colonialism, Seamus Deane writes, is a process of radical dispossession. A colonized people without a specific history and even, as in Ireland and other cases, without a specific language (10). However, to describe the colonial experience only in terms of loss a failure to recognize the resistance a colonized people offer in the face of their subjection. Thus, the initial moment of loss has as its correlative a struggle to regain, repossess and remember those things that have been effaced by colonialism. In Ireland and elsewhere this struggle frequently takes the form of an explicit nationalism; the colonized country struggles to assert its own radical difference from its oppressor in both the political and cultural arena, since these are necessarily and inseparably intertwined. On the one hand it attempts to assert its political independence from the colonizing power with a declaration of its own sovereignty and destiny as a nation state. On the other hand it attempts to recover a sense of national identity or origin, by reviving a lost language, cultural tradition and communal