Electric Light

"[Heaney] exercises poetry's power to proclaim truth and the artist's power to make us know that it is a truth we can't be without."—Richard Eder, The New York Times

"[Heaney's] awareness of his aging, which he turns away from in memory and looks past in poems about death, gives [Electric Light] special coherence and poignance . . . Like most of Heaney's books, it is a compendium of poetic genres."—Langdon Hammer, The New York Times Book Review

"The greatest Irish poet since Yeats continues to dazzle in his latest volume."—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In [poems] like these, description rises to transcendent distillation."—Desmond Ryan, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Electric Light is worth buying, reading, and committing portions of to memory."—Joshua Weiner, Chicago Tribune

"Among living, English-speaking poets, few make words perform as nimbly as Irish Nobelist Heaney. Each new book seems at once a deepening and a broadening of the tongue, as if he were synthesizing the cumulative, bardic voice of centuries . . . The protean poems in [Electric Light] ripple with birth and death, travel and memory, and subsume debts to both spiritual mentors (Virgil, Dante, Yeats) and peers (Hughes, Brodsky). They are rustic yet learned, classical yet contemporary . . . Heaney's secret handshake with language remains firm."—Library Journal