Settings xx

  The ‘Settings’ sequence presents a chain of backdrops against which personal events and dramas were played out. Within the dynamic period preceding Seeing Things when Heaney deliberately swooped on anything that stimulated memory or association (DOD 320),  he allowed himself to be transported back by the poems that ‘came on’ to the sites, moments and emotions of previous experience, from where he weighed up what ‘in time … was extra, unforeseen and free’ (Markings I). Behind every picture lurks a story. On tour the poet stands at a picture post-card site in Central Moscow (Red Square) and sifts what he sees against what he ‘knows’ about the Kremlin building: its brick wall ostensibly nothing out of the ordinary (unthreatening […]