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 Seamus Heaney's late father.
"[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)
"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. . . ."
