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District and Circle

By Seamus Heaney

(1)

| Hardcover | 9780571230969

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Book Description

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 haContinue

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 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 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.

Critics

  • Digging deep

    District and Circle, by Seamus Heaney (76pp, Faber, £12.99) When Seamus Heaney started writing at full throttle in the 1970s, much mention was made of Robert Lowell's judgment that he was "the best Irish poet since Yeats". As soundbites go, this was ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Arms around the world

    District and Circleby Seamus Heaney Faber £12.99, pp76 In his 12th collection of poetry in 40 years, and his first in five, Seamus Heaney describes a world overshadowed by war, a place in which both the power and the horror of violence seem inescapab ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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9780571230969 Hardcover $20.91 -- The Book Depository
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