This past week, Seamus Heaney was awarded the prestigious David Cohen prize for his life's work in poetry. It gave Heaney (who turns 70 next month) the chance to reflect on his career, and gives us the chance to as well. The ceremony, interestingly, called for Heaney to select two poems that sum up his work. He was upfront about the difficulty of this: " I have a slight problem in knowing how to represent a lifetime of poems by reading only a couple of them."