Seeing Things

First edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. [x], 113. Publisher's pale grey cloth, lettered in gilt to spine; tan endpapers. Dustwrapper features a detail from the Gundestrup Cauldron to cover. Lightly rubbed to dustwrapper edges and folds, else Fine.

Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his poetry's 'combination of lyrical beauty and ethical depth which exalt everyday miracles and the living past'. In his acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy of Letters, published as Crediting Poetry (1995), Heaney signified his turn away from the "Heaviness of being," the poems written in response to "The Troubles," as referred to in "Fosterling," (p. 50) toward a visionary imagination that "credit[s] marvels".

When the book first appeared in 1991, some readers formerly admiring of Heaney's unflinching representation of sectarian violence, were dismayed with his embrace of the visionary or ethereal. Written in Glanmore, the cottage in Co. Wicklow, where the poet settled in 1972, after the turbulence of Belfast, and where his key early works North (1975), and Field Work (1979), were also composed. "[A] new masterwork emerge[s] and take[s] its permanent place in our literature." –John Carey, The Sunday Times

[Brandes & Durkan A50a]