Seamus Heaney's new collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the orgins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus on the Bann valley in County Derry.

The book ranges from short takes ('glosses') to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to 'the must and drift of talk'. The pre-Socratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming 'the real names' of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign the things their proper names; once again Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and roll-call in this new collection.

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