Seeing Things.

SEEING THE THING Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $19, 107 pp.

Framed by translations from Virgil and Dante, Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things carries the reader on a voyage to re-encounter the metaphors and purposes of journeying. On the cover of the book there is a gold boat, a marvel of survival as well as ancient craft; it comes from a hoard of objects discovered at Broigher, County Derry. It surfaces in

   "The Biretta" in a sequence of similes:
that small boat out of the Bronze Age
Where the oars are needles and the
worked gold frail
   As the intact half of a hatched-out
shell,
   Refined beyond dross into sheer image.

The reader catches glimpses of the gold vessel throughout this book of lyrics and sequences, but it is Donne's attenuated thread, connecting two souls in "an expansion,/ Like gold to airy thinness beat" that marks the poems most vividly. The two souls belong to father and son, not the lovers of Donne's "A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning." Heaney's elegies relentlessly embark upon mourning, investigate the breach between the dead and the living, and negotiate the difficult return.

Heaney draws and crosses the line that divides father and son--and stretches between them--in "Markings," where the line becomes the sign of the father's genius:

   You also loved lines pegged out in
the garden,
   The spade nicking the first straight
edge along
   The tight white string. Or string
stretched perfectly
   To mark the outline of a house
foundation
   ...Or the imaginary line straight
down
   A field of grazing, to be ploughed
open
   From the rod stuck in one headrig
to the rod
   Stuck in the other,

The son inherits the father's skill with lines, reminding us of the frequently anthologized early poem, "Digging," in which the poet listens to the sound of his father's spade and takes up a different tool: "Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it." In this volume, the poet does not snatch up his father's dropped tools. Rather he seeks to follow the path of the flung pitchfork:

   Past its own aim, out to an other side
   Where perfection--or nearness to
it--is imagined
   Not in the aiming but the opening
hand."

A sequence of sequences makes up the second part of Seeing Things;here Heaney contrasts the plain, clear sentences that let us see the things that he sees, with visions discovered and launched in words from his word-hoard. So poem XXX of "Squarings" begins in the matter-of-fact, "On St. Brigid's Day the new lite could be entered/By going through her girdle of straw rope:" and ends with a flash of the gold with which Heaney's poems are wrought: "imagine/The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings/Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland."

Andrew Hudgins's third book of poems, The Never-Ending, depends upon juxtapositions for its considerable energy. In "Compost: An Ode," the poet celebrates the homely ingredients of the compost heap and the surprising heat they create as they decay: "...In summer, the heap / burns like a stove. It can--almost--hurt you." The colloquial force of that "--almost--" in a poem that also reaches to elegant description ("a leisurely collapsing of/the thing/into its possibilities") conveys the characteristic qualifying of the poet's intervening voice. Hudgins claims the lyric poet's most venerable traditional forms--prayer, psalm, ode, lamentation, elegy--and deploys them wryly, with qualifications, as his titles suggest: "Praying Drunk"; "Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead"; "The Liar's Psalm." He expresses his sell-consciousness about the demands of forms, and the human inability to live up to these expectations in "Praying Drunk":

   I'm usually asleep by now the time
for supplication. Requests. As if
   I'd stayed
up late and called the radio and
asked
they play a sentimental song.
   Embarrassed.

Hudgins's debunking vision insists on seeing things as they appear; his poems based on paintings and images of the life of Christ best demonstrate this attention to detail, as in "Dead Christ," where the reader hesitates and then recognizes the wounds: "And on the pink, scrubbed bottom of each foot/a bee-stung lip pouts daintily." The poet does not hesitate from reporting the effect of such envisioning; the poem concludes, "Most Christs return. But this one's flesh. He isn't coming back?

Finally, Hudgins's poems demonstrate the vitality of metaphor as "a form of praying." In "Two Ember Days in Alabama," blackbirds "fat and glossy as eight balls" eat up the world during Lent, "Building energy/for exodus." The blackbirds attain their full symbolic freight when they betray the observing eye by departing:

   They've swelled the barren woods,
loading the unleaved trees like the
black fruit
   of nothingness. And now they sim
-ply leave.
   First fall, then winter. Then this
long pause. And then
the starting over. And then the never
-ending.

Alan Shapiro's Covenant, also a third book, makes a remarkable addition to the University of Chicago Press's excellent series, Phoenix Poets. Perhaps because the volumes are considered only at the invitation of the editor, Robert Von Hallberg, and not as the result of a contest judged by different poets each year, this series has the continuity and commitment to individual poets missing from some of the other poetry series.

Shapiro's unflinching poems range from the uncomfortable to the ecstatic to the excruciating. The opening poem, "The Sweepers," demonstrates the poet's attempt to recover the humanity of the anonymous sweepers who cleared the streets to make way for Scipio's approaching army. The writer of the Roman history "doesn't say" who they were or what they thought; the poet fills in the gap with conjectures:

   Or were these the masters? the
wealthjest'? their money,
somehow, having gotten them this
far, as yet unharmed?
   their fingers blistering as they plied
crowbar and boat hook,
  dowel and axe, the pain a punish
-ment for the dumb animal
   persistence that so easily and
thoroughly tumed friend and relation,
   the whole rich tapestry of custom
-ary feeling, law, memory and
lore
  into mere fill lot gullies'?

The plenitude of the poet's imagination does not excuse him from the complicity of going along with what the writer has chosen to represent: "Here one turns the page," Shapiro concludes, "and goes on reading." Acting as a warning as well as an invitation, "The Sweepers" cannot prepare the reader for all the subjects that lie within, but it suggests that motives and responses are not only recoverable but plural. "The Visitation," for instance, narrates in three stanzas the speaker's experience of gridlock. The first stanza looks ahead into the jammed intersection, at the "old guy, honking, honking," and "the tight knot they were trying to untie/by tying tighter, till it was my turn not to let him through." Foreknowledge does not spare the speaker from the assault of the old guy's hatred: "making it my fault he had to lunge out/before me, that my brakes slammed, that I yelled back, asshole,/what's the rush?" The line jerks and surges with the traffic and with the quick shifts in emotion--the speaker feels "good solace" when the old guy gets by.

By far the most harrowing of the poems in this volume, "The Lesson," reconstructs the fascination, curiosity, envy, pride, shame, and memory of a young boy who goes along with a child molester. "For a long time afterward/all I could think of/was the one time/he took me...." The poem opens with understated menace, balanced on the ambiguous "took." Despite the "claw-like" fingers, demonstrating the "luckyknuckle," a secret pitch, the man in the car might seem to onlookers "a proud father." Yet like "The Sweepers," this poem is preoccupied with the difficulty of identifying father, son, teacher, pupil, lesson: "How would I ever say/to anyone who he was?" Shapiro handles the recreation of the playground scene, the boys' fascination with Rich in his gold Sting Ray, their giggling "high-pitched ignorant/unease" at his questions, and the drama of awaiting selection for the transforming "ride" with excruciating clarity. Afterwards, the speaker reflects:

 A boy is nowhere
 else more boy-like
 than in the way he
 imagines being a man.
 My boyhood ended
 there, that day, with nothing
 else to take its place.
 Now I had no name
 for what I was.
  The image of impossibility takes its
vehicle from the the world of playground
games, "red light, green light" and from
the adult world of the car:
  To try to think it,
 say it, was to look
 down some vast avenue,
 through an infinity of red lights
 and not know any
 word for green.
    The most primary oppositions have
been undermined, including innocence
and guilt.