District and Circle

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts 'in an age of bare hands and cast iron' and ends 'as the automatic lock / clanks 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 the 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 Tolland 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.

Reviews

Praise for "Electric Light":
"Heaney's status as one of the most significant poets writing in English and the greatest Irish poet since Yeats in already well established. "Electric Light" is further confirmation of his power to capture and transcend the immediacy of the moment, to find the stillness at the heart of things." --Joe Treasure," Los Angeles Times Book Review
"""Electric Light" includes poems that are sparks of fulminating retrospection . . . To say it the best I can . . . 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 . . . Engagement is the heart of a poem . . . and Mr. Heaney's strongest engagement in this collection is with time: the past that lives, the present that dies." --Richard Eder, "The New York Times"
Praise for "Electric Light:
"Heaney's status as one of the most significant poets writing in English and the greatest Irish poet since Yeats in already well established. "Electric Light is further confirmation of his power to capture and transcend the immediacy of the moment, to find the stillness at the heart of things." --Joe Treasure," Los Angeles Times Book Review
""Electric Light includes poems that are sparks of fulminating retrospection . . . To say it the best I can . . . [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 . . . Engagement is the heart of a poem . . . and Mr. Heaney's strongest engagement in this collection is with time: the past that lives, the present that dies." --Richard Eder, "The New York Times

Author Bio

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. District and Circle is his twelfth collection of poems, and his first new collection for five years.