District and Circle Poems

District and Circleinhabits 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. Scenes from a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous presenta fireman's helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacierare fraught with this same anxiety. But the volume, which includes some "found 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. With more relish and conviction than ever, Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals. Seamus Heaney'sfirst collection,Death of a Naturalist, appeared forty years ago. Since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 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 from of a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous presenta journey on the Underground, a melting glacierare fraught with this same anxiety. ButDistrict and Circle, which includes some "found prose" and a number of 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 ghoststhreats to the planet are intuited in the local place, yet a lyric force prevails. With more relish and conviction than ever, Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals. "Nobel prize winner Heaney's latest collection of robust lyrics celebrates work, memory, and the physicality of existence . . . these poems are scored into the page with Heaney's signature accentual and alliterative force. They demonstrate that words can be braced and wedged and lifted and swung from the shoulder, leaving almost physical traces of the objects they name . . . Heaney's poetry presents the 'mass and majesty of this world' with unparalleled vigor. Recommended."Fred Muratori,Library Journal "District and Circleplays rich variations on old themes. For all its roughening rhyming, there's a remarkable consistency to Heaney's oeuvre over the decadesa personal evolution strikingly clear of self-repudiations and dead-ends. The author ofDistrict and Circleis unmistakably the flourishing direct descendant of his first collection,Death of a Naturalist(1966) . . .District and Circlebrims with lovely evocations, reconstructions, restorations: a fireman's helmet, a barber shop fitted into a 'one-room one-chimney house'; an aerodrome; a man playing a saw 'inside the puddle doorway / of a downtown shop in Belfast' . . . His voice carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspokeneven though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken

Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, appeared forty years ago. Since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.