Seeing Things is the eighth poetry collection by
Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995
Nobel Prize in Literature. It was published in 1991. Heaney draws inspiration from the visions of afterlife in
Virgil and
Dante Alighieri in order to come to terms with the death of his father, Patrick, in 1986. The title, Seeing Things, refers both to the solid, fluctuating world of objects and to a haunted, hallucinatory realm of the imagination.[1] Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.