This collection of Seamus Heaney's work, especially in the vivid and surprising twelve-line poems entitled 'Squarings', shows he is ready to re-imagine experience and 'to credit marvels'.

Translations of Virgil and Homer provide a prelude and a coda where motifs implicit in the earlier lyrics are given direct expression in extended narratives.

Journeys to underworlds and otherworlds correspond to the journeys made by poetic language itself.