Crossings xxxii

  From cover to cover Seeing Things presents a series of interfaces: journeys in and out of real world situations; between real and mythical; between secular and spiritual; between existence and annihilation; between objective and subjective; from the present into the future; between first order experience and seeing things through new eyes. Such crossings involve a range of access points: doors, windows, gates, casements, a bridge across a ditch that unites him both with the life of his childhood (still present in the landscape and language) and a ghostly revenant, the recently deceased father whose death left the poet ‘unroofed’. Heaney pays tribute to the never distant, ever-satisfying element of his rural Ulster upbringing (Running water never disappointed). It provided […]