Seeing Things Poems

by Heaney, Seamus

• ISBN13: 9780374523893
• ISBN10: 0374523894
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-04-01
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Seeing Things(1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote inThe 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 theAeneidand theInferno, this book offers several poems about Heaney's late father. Seamus Heaneyreceived the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His many books of poetry includeOpened Ground,Electric Light,The Spirit Level,Seeing Things,Station Island,The Haw Lantern, andField Work, as well as translations ofBeowulfandDiary of One Who Vanished. A resident of Dublin, he has taught poetry at Oxford University and Harvard University. In 2004, Heaney was presented with theKenyon ReviewAward for Literary Achievement. Seeing Things(1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote inThe 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 theAeneidand theInferno, this book offers several poems about Heaney's late father. "Heaney's most plain-spoken and autobiographical book to date. Here is the transcendence ofSeeing 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 "[ReadingSeeing Things] you feel what readers of say, Keats's odes or Milton's 1645 collection must have feltthe peculiar excitement of watching a new masterwork emerge and take its permanent place in our literature."John Carey,The Sunday Times(London)

Author Biography

Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Table of Contents

The Golden Bough	3	(6)
PART I
The Journey Back	9	(1)
Markings	10	(2)
Three Drawings	12	(3)
The point	12	(1)
The Pulse	13	(1)
A Haul	14	(1)
Casting and Gathering	15	(1)
Man and Boy	16	(2)
Seeing Things	18	(3)
The Ash Plant	21	(1)
I.I. 87	22	(1)
An August Night	23	(1)
Field of Vision	24	(1)
The Pitchfork	25	(1)
A Basket of Chestnuts	26	(2)
The Biretta	28	(2)
The Settle Bed	30	(2)
The Schoolbag	32	(1)
Glanmore Revisited	33	(7)
Scrabble	33	(1)
The Cot	34	(1)
Scene Shifts	35	(1)
1973	36	(1)
Lustral Sonnet	37	(1)
Bedside Reading	38	(1)
The Skylight	39	(1)
A Pillowed Head	40	(2)
A Royal Prospect	42	(2)
A Retrospect	44	(3)
The Rescue	47	(1)
Wheels within Wheels	48	(2)
The Sounds of Rain	50	(2)
Fosterling	52	(53)
PART II/SQUARINGS
Lightenings	55	(12)
Settings	67	(12)
Crossings	79	(12)
Squarings	91	(14)
The Crossing	105