Description:
Seeing Things (1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven." Along with translations from the Aeneid and the Inferno, this book offers several poems about Heaney's late father.
Brief description: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."
Review Quotes:
"Heaney's most plain-spoken and autobiographical book to date. Here is the transcendence of Seeing Things, the simple and miraculous escalation from a sixth sense to a seventh heaven, the lovely delusive optics of sawing and cycling and barred gates. . . ." --Michael Hofmann, The London Review of Books
"[Reading Seeing Things] you feel what readers of say, Keats's odes or Milton's 1645 collection must have felt--the peculiar excitement of watching a new masterwork emerge and take its permanent place in our literature." --John Carey, The Sunday Times (London)