Settle down!
Firstly: Get some info about Ireland and also Heaney's context.
This should immediately enlighten you to three things:
1. Ireland ["local" and "traditional"] v. the British ["global" and the colonisers/imperial] (which is a big theme in many of his poems)
2. Traditional Irish culture is characterised by many things such as toiling the land, respect for elders etc (can be seen in "digging") etc
3. Heaney is an academic. His family come from a long line of the "traditional". In many of his writings he is reconciling - poscolonial style - the differences between the traditional/local and the global.
From here you can begin looking at his writings in more depth.
Some writings reflect on a childhood, by doing this it's "collapsing space and time" in a post-modern style where in many cases it's not discernable where reality begins or ends and where in time we actually are. Time fragments.
Other writings are political - Tollund Man and Funeral Rites in particular do this and have the feature of not only collapsing time and space but also make local knowledge global and vis-a-vis. You can see this happening in Tollund Man where the happenings of Ancient Denmark "germinate" into the happenings in contemporary Ireland - particularly then the "four brothers" are dragged along the "lines" (train lines).
So you need to look at overtly political sentiments AND the sentiments of the traditional that he incorporates in his poetry. I'm guessing a combination of recognising where this stems from e.g. post-colonialism and post-modernism as well as the "criteria" in the elective statement should do.
From what I can tell, the elective statement appears that it wants us to REFUTE what it is saying and not agree with it. That is, "universal truths" DON'T exist (as only "little narratives" exist in post-modernism).
The techniques are the standard ones that apply to poetry that are hanging around somewhere but I am too busy to go and look at.
I'm not sure that I am right, but this is to the best of my understanding what I know about his elective/module.
