ABSTRACT
Some of the individual volumes seem to have a higher profile, with the others no more than intermediary stages filling out developments which can be more clearly seen in those higher-profiled books. Stan Smith, hardly less grandly, sees the whole volume as concerned with the learning of all language as a symbolic and analogical system of representation, beginning with the father's hands shadowing a rabbit on the wall. The remarkable claim made in Heaney's most recent book is that the movement away from the material opacity of the language of the early poetry towards a more transparent medium is complete. It might be noted in a preliminary way that Heaney's post-Seeing Things poems seem to be using grammatical terminology very prominently. Steadiness and reassurance are needed - not only because of the sense of transience which is the unlaboured backdrop to the book in the figure of the poet's dead father.
