District and Circle: Poems

By Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II – railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence" of "Cattle out in rain" – are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present – a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety.

But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems which "do the rounds of the district" – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466855496

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

Book preview

Reviews for District and Circle

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found the last third of this collection to be the best. The first third I didn't much care for but I may have just not been in the right mood for them.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a slim volume of poetry, although my favorite was the few pages in the middle of what the author called Found Prose; beautiful short descriptions. Most of the poetry was about the author's rural Irish childhood, but other poems wanders into the American Midwest or to the London Underground. Lushly descriptive, they evoke time and place more completely than anything I've read, or even a sepia-toned photograph. In Saw Music Heaney describes a busker in a store doorway:Flop-wobble grace note or high banshee whine.Rain spat upon his threadbare gabardine, Into his cap where the occasional tossed coinBasked on damp lining, the raindrops glittering

[vpfluke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am writing a review of this book, because the title poem, "District and Circle" is a great poem. This is one of the best evocations I have read of what it feels to be in the undergound, this alternate world of mostly moving humanity. But Heaney starts off with one of the non-moving denizens, a player of a tin-whistle. Then he drives forth into the almost cacaphonous platforms and trains. At last, he comes to a more silent area where he thinks of father in a vaguely similar 'flicker-lit' world.