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." He also calls "Field Work" “one of my favorites. In its own way it was a book of change also; it moved me from the intensity of "North" to something more measured, in both formal and emotional terms."