Seeing Things

This collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled 'Squarings', shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and 'to credit marvels'. The title poem, 'Seeing Things', is typical of the whole book. It begins with memories of an actual event, then moves towards the visionary while never relinquishing its feel for the textures and sensations of the world. Translations of Virgil and Homer provide a prelude and a coda where motifs implicit in the earlier lyrics are given direct expression in extended narratives. Journeys to underworlds and otherworlds correspond to the journeys made by poetic language itself. From the author of 'The Haw Lantern', 'Wintering Out', 'Station Island' and 'North'.