SOURCE: A review of Seeing Things, in The Yale Review, Vol. 80, Nos. 1-2, 1992, pp. 236-54.

In the following essay, Pinsky provides a favorable review of Heaney's Seeing Things.

Seamus Heaney's poems have earned a host of literary awards and about as much public celebration as is likely for any poet in our time. A native of Northern Ireland, a man of great personal charm, wit, eloquence in speech, and probity, Heaney has attracted (he attention of journalists in this country and around the world. His work has been embraced by academic critics, taught in schools and universities, and made the object of Ph.D. dissertations.

Nevertheless, he is a wonderful poet, one of the best writing, as his new book Seeing Things demonstrates anew. The book also provides a comparison of poetry's dual presence—immediate and yet of the past, of the earth and of the air, of...