Seeing Things is his ninth collection of poems and it draws inspiration from the visions of afterlife of Virgil and Dante Alighieri. Reading his poems makes you feel that you are standing on a crossroad with pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle around you and you have to take careful steps toward a certain direction. Careful because all around you are visions of inferno, purgatorio or paradiso and one wrong step could lead you to a place you don’t want to be. Wiki says that the poems are written by Heaney as his way of coming to terms with his father’s death in 1986. Hence, most of the poems are haunting, hallucinatory with a tinge of forgiveness and acceptance. Tinge, because the way Heaney expressed himself is not as straightforward as the other earlier not-so-many poems I’ve read. You have to twist your brain and think deeper to grasp what you think are his messages. He uses lots of metaphors and symbolisms so I would say that his poems, at least those included in this book, are not for everyone. But what I liked about his poems is that they create vivid though illusory images while you are reading them. Take for example, this second stanza of Markings: Youngsters shouting their heads off the field As the light died and they kept on playing Because by then they were playing in their heads And the actual kicked ball came to them Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard Breathing in the dark and skids on grass Sounded like effort in another world… It was quick and constant, a game that never need Be played out. Some limit had been passed, There was fleetness, furtherance , untiredness In time that was extra, unforeseen and free. Magical, right? First I pictured the boys playing a ball game in a field. Then the image shifted to that of cerebral setting: that the playing was only in their brains. Then it becomes celestial as if everything is an illusion and part of images in the universe.

It's very much a collection, not just a collection of poems, united by the theme of what you could call 'transcendence'. In a couple of the poems Heaney contrasts the transcendence he desires with that of Yeats, the great evaded predecessor, and freeing the body from the soul.

Heaney's version is embodied: rooted in sensation, memory, childhood and his father - who as elsewhere in Heaney's work is represents a kind of authenticity. The Squarings poems are the strongest in the book, along with a few others. Some are large poems compressed into the twelve line form, and some are very strong indeed.

In these poems Heaney shifts modes with great subtlety, as here, where earth becomes light:

Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone
Clarified and dormant under water,
The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic
The moorings barely stirred in, very slight
Clucking of the swell against boat boards
.
Perfected vision: cockle minarets
Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle-glass,
Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.

Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.