District and circle

by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaneys 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 twentieth-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 coloured 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 road