Seamus Heaney

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.

Poems

Seeing Things

Gavin

Don’t like nature poets. The post-Thoreau tend to be casually nihilistic about science and humanity, however much beauty and innocence they display. 

But Heaney’s a naturalist, not a nature poet. He talks about the same few things – stone, dirt, the nature of light for a child, the act of building, wind – hundreds of times and still casts newness. It hurts to read for some reason – he’s never miserable, and rarely handles even abstract tragedy explicitly, but I get tight behind my eyes.

Combine intellect with poetry and you get Heaney.

Klára Kováčiková 

Eugenia Andino

Seamus Heaney es un poeta difícil de entender, entre otros motivos porque habla de la vida rural con vocabulario que no encuentras en otro sitio. ¿Quién más te va a escribir poemas sobre pájaros que solo hay en Irlanda o sobre las partes de un barco? Hay que leerlo todo despacio y varias veces. El ejercicio compensa. Este libro, escrito pocos años después de la muerte de su padre, mezcla esas descripciones del campo con reflexiones sobre la muerte y la familia.

Seeing Things Poems

Reviews