ABSTRACT
So does one of the twelve-line curtal sonnets in The Squarings’ section of Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things (1991) open. This slow, self-instructional mode, a kind of rigour of the mind, is one that presents itself strongly throughout the book. It is saying: go steady, look, look deep, look again, think, feel, experience, let the words become instinct with awareness, fretted with thought. Make them so intensely alive to things that they share to some extent in the nature of the things they represent. Let poetry be a scope for wonder, for the opening of being; think, but think through. The process working here in this book is an enactment of the tense pressure of utter collectedness that Martin Heidegger alerts us to in his dialogue on language with D.T. Suzuki, where each philosopher courteously refrains from literalness in order that the thinking can show the beauty of language itself, the glorious fact of its existence.2 Heaney in this book creates a poetry of decorous waiting, of readiness to receive impressions, a poetry capable of seeing things in the gold light it itself is capable of shedding.
