Title: Seeing Things
Author: Seamus Heaney
Category: Poetry
ISBN: 0374523894
Seeing Things
Seamus Heaney
Why do I have the feeling I did not understand this collection completely? :-) This is the second recent Nobel Laureate whose book I've read, and this was a very different experience from Symborska's work. Symborska attempts to view everyday things from a different perspective, which makes her work easily understandable. Heaney is more of a story-teller, recreating experiences; he often alludes to classical myths and Irish words that I did not understand. Nevertheless, there were some poems that I really liked.
The Nobel Prize citation commends him for "works of lyrical quality and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". In Fosterling he writes:
At school, I loved one picture's heavy greenness --
Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.
The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can't remember never having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land.
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
The poem I liked most was Wheels within Wheels which begins
The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedalling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
Its back wheel preternaturally fast.
I loved the dissapearance of the spokes,
The way the space between the hub and the rim
Hummed with transparency. If you threw
A potato into it,the hooped air
Spun mush and drizzle back into your face;
If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered.
Something about the way those pedal treads
Worked very palpably at first against you
And then began to sweep your hand ahead
Into a new momentum -- that all entered me
Like an access of free power, as if belief
Caught up and spun the objects of belief
In an orbit coterminous with longing.
Worth reading, even though a person with a background in literature would probably understand some poems much better.