Seeing Things: Poems

Rating:
Summary: In Honor Of St Patrick's Day...
Review: i thought i'd read a irish writer. i couldn't think of a better choice than heaney. the poems here are subtle, but infinitely brilliant. i love the way he uses mythology in some of the pieces, taking references from dante and homer. he draws from his family life, childhood, and his lifelong experiences to create poems that are wondrous in form and content.

Rating:
Summary: A formidable achievement
Review: Perhaps this book represents Heaney's finest poetry since 'Field Work.' It contains the magnificent sequence 'Squarings,' and a continuation of his Glanmore sonnets. The craftsmanship impeccable, the voice down-to-earth.

We remember especially his sonnet on Lent in which the poet deals with 'A fasted will marauding through the body,' and the poem "Wheels within Wheels," where a child spins the pedals of an inverted bicycle and notes "The way the space between the hub and rim / Hummed with transparency." Note the unobtrusive assonances, & the exact right words.

In one of the twelve-line poems of 'Squarings', Heaney counsels himself and other poets: 'Do not waver / Into language. Do not waver in it.' In this sequence, it is Heaney's happy accomplishment to have heeded that counsel in an exemplary fashion. Driving through an avenue or tunnel of trees, arching over a quarter-mile stretch of country road, Heaney sees the trees as 'Calligraphic shocks / Bushed and tufted in prevailing winds.' Could Thomas Hardy or Wallace Stevens have done as well?

Talking about it isn't good enough,

But quoting from it at least demonstrates

The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

Rating:
Summary: A Lustral Masterpiece!
Review: This startling and astonishing book is all about how we resolve the tension between living in our imaginary worlds, and what is called, reality. It's about how the imaginary and the real depend upon each other to exist, in the realm of the human. These poems are full of loss and longing, revelation, and wonder.

"A Basket of Chestnuts" is a splendid poem about what we can take with us, through keepsakes and love and memory, and what is lost as we live our lives. An engaging and transforming marvel of a poem.

Heaney has invented his own poetic form here, and he calls this form, a "Squaring." One of the Squarings:Lightenings poems is so astonishing that it leaves me breathless in how it makes the marvelous real.

Ultimately, this book is about what is real, and what is imagined, and where the line is between the two. This book suggests that the imagined is real, in its own manner, entirely real.

The lustrousness and the lusciousness, and the depth of these poems leave me astounded, grounded, invigorated, astonished, and very moved.

This book is a resounding, ever-changingly-lit, glorious, symphonic masterpiece.

I recommend this book to everybody.