Electric Light

Pocketbok. Faber & Faber . First uppl. 2001. 81 sidor.

Gott skick. Seamus Heaneys new collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry
Flectric Light ranges from short takes (glosses) to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to the must and drift of talk'. The pre-Socratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegizing friends and fellow poets, naming
"the real names' of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign to things their proper names; once again Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and roll-call in this, his eleventh collection.