Seeing Things Poems

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)

Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.