Seeing Things in Seeing Things: Architectural Responses to Seamus Heaney

This chapter describes the poems of Heaney’s collection, Seeing Things and their architectural responses, attempting to understand their resonances. Heaney’s collection, Seeing Things, is first discussed by describing its structure and identifying key themes and ideas relating to place, memory, time, ‘marvels’, and metaphors formed from everyday experiences, objects, and actions. Select reference, where relevant, is made to the body of critical writing which has gathered around Heaney, although the emphasis of the paper is focused on the responses of each architect to the poet’s work. Each architect is then discussed in turn, drawing on their writing, lectures, and built work; supplemented by dialogue with Dow and McLaughlin. The chapter concludes by placing Heaney back into a more complex context where relations between poet, architect, place, and proposition become blurred and entangled.