District and Circle: Poems

by Seamus Heaney

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466855496
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/13/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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."

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE TURNIPSNEDDER

For Hughie O'Donoghue

In an age of bare hands and cast iron,

the clamp-on meat-mincer,
it dug its heels in among wooden tubs and troughs of slops,

hotter than body heat in summertime, cold in winter

as winter's body armour,
standing guard on four braced greaves.

"This is the way that God sees life,"
as the handle turned and turnip-heads were let fall and fed

to the juiced-up inner blades,
as it dropped its raw sliced mess,
A SHIVER

The way you had to stand to swing the sledge,
POLISH SLEEPERS

Once they'd been block-built criss-cross and four-squared We lived with them and breathed pure creosote Until they were laid and landscaped in a kerb,
ANAHORISH 1944

"We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
TO MICK JOYCE IN HEAVEN

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
THE AERODROME

First it went back to grass, then after that To warehouses and brickfields (designated The Creagh Meadows Industrial Estate),
Into a hard-edged CEO style villa:
But not a smell of daisies and hot tar On a newly surfaced cart road, Easter Monday,
All the brighter for having been denied.
Had been and would be. Sparrows might fall,
Watching and waiting by the perimeter.
With the pilot calling from his Thunderbolt?
If self is a location, so is love:
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

after Horace, Odes, I, 34

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Ground gives. The heaven's weight Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
HELMET

Bobby Breen's. His Boston fireman's gift With BREEN in scarlet letters on its spread Fantailing brim,

Tinctures of sweat and hair oil In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs Beneath the crown —

Or better say the crest, for crest it is —
Bobby Breen's badged helmet's on my shelf These twenty years, "the headgear Of the tribe," as O'Grady called it

In right heroic mood that afternoon When the fireman-poet presented it to me As "the visiting fireman" —

As if I were up to it, as if I had Served time under it, his fire-thane's shield,
And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.

OUT OF SHOT

November morning sunshine on my back This bell-clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut-firm On the unseasonably warm Top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock,
RILKE: AFTER THE FIRE

Early autumn morning hesitated,
Where youngsters gathered up from god knows where Hunted and yelled and ran wild in a pack.
Dragged an out-of-shape old can or kettle From under hot, half burnt away house-beams;
To make them realize what had stood so.
DISTRICT AND CIRCLE

Tunes from a tin whistle underground Curled up a corridor I'd be walking down To where I knew I was always going to find My watcher on the tiles, cap by his side,
• * *

Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts Of escalators ascending and descending To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,
• * *

Another level down, the platform thronged.
• * *

Stepping on to it across the gap,
• * *

So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,
And so by night and day to be transported Through galleried earth with them, the only relict Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,
TO GEORGE SEFERIS IN THE UNDERWORLD

The men began arguing about the spiky bushes that were in brilliant yellow bloom on the slopes: were they caltrop or gorse? ... "That reminds me of something," said George. "I don't know ..."

That greeny stuff about your feet is asphodel and rightly so,
And of a spring day in your days of '71: Poseidon making waves in sea and air around Cape Sounion, its very name all ozone-breeze and cavern-boom,
The bloody light. To hell with it.
As was only right for a tyrant. But still, for you, maybe too much i' the right, too black and white,
And for me a chance to test the edge of seggans, dialect blade hoar and harder and more hand-to-hand than what is common usage nowadays:
WORDSWORTH'S SKATES

Star in the window.
Not the bootless runners lying toppled In dust in a display case,
But the reel of them on frozen Windermere As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve And left it scored.

THE HARROW-PIN

We'd be told, "If you don't behave There'll be nothing in your Christmas stocking for you But an old kale stalk." And we would believe him.

But if kale meant admonition, a harrow-pin Was correction's veriest unit.
Out of a harder time, it was a stake He'd drive through aspiration and pretence For our instruction.

Let there once be any talk of decoration,
Brute-forced, rusted, haphazardly set pins From harrows wrecked by horse-power over stones Lodged in the stable wall and on them hung

Horses' collars lined with sweat-veined ticking,
Out there, in musts of bedding cut with piss He put all to the test. Inside, in the house,
And horse-sensed as the travelled Gulliver,
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "District and Circle"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Seamus Heaney.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Notes and Acknowledgements,
The Turnip-Snedder,
A Shiver,
Polish Sleepers,
Anahorish 1944,
To Mick Joyce in Heaven,
The Aerodrome,
Anything Can Happen,
Helmet,
Out of Shot,
Rilke: After the Fire,
District and Circle,
To George Seferis in the Underworld,
Wordsworth's Skates,
The Harrow-Pin,
Poet to Blacksmith,
Midnight Anvil,
Súgán,
Senior Infants,
1. The Sally Rod,
2. A Chow,
3. One Christmas Day in the Morning,
The Nod,
A Clip,
Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road,
Found Prose,
1. The Lagans Road,
2. Tall Dames,
3. Boarders,
The Lift,
Nonce Words,
Stern,
Out of This World,
1. "Like everybody else ...",
2. Brancardier,
3. Saw Music,
In Iowa,
Höfn,
On the Spot,
The Tollund Man in Springtime,
Moyulla,
Planting the Alder,
Tate's Avenue,
A Hagging Match,
Fiddleheads,
To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff,
Home Help,
1. Helping Sarah,
2. Chairing Mary,
Rilke: The Apple Orchard,
Quitting Time,
Home Fires,
1. A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth,
2. A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden,
The Birch Grove,
Cavafy: "The rest I'll speak of to the ones below in,
Hades",
In a Loaning,
The Blackbird of Glanmore,

Editorial Reviews

Heaney has always had a gift for recounting chance encounters, poignant little anecdotes. His voice carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken - even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say.
— The New York Times

Brad Leithauser

If literary history (and its brutal instrument, the anthology) preserves only this poem from so impressive a volume, it will be enough to remind us why Heaney remains such a celebrated poet, why many place him firmly among the best of the 20th century and why his work continues to be worth rereading long after it has, in his words,"set the darkness echoing" behind it.
— The Washington Post

Anthony Cuda

The latest from the Irish Nobel laureate may be his best in more than a decade. Celebrations of everyday objects (a fireman's helmet, a sledgehammer, an anvil), homages to and elegies for other poets (George Seferis, Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz) and gleaming recollections from the author's rural youth dominate this lyrical volume, which stands out as well for its diversity of forms: the supple pentameters Heaney perfected in such 1990s volumes as Seeing Things rub shoulders with prose poems, rough-hewn quatrains and slower-paced free verse reminiscent of the 1970s poems that made his name. Many efforts strike a ground note of nostalgia: "A Clip" remembers the "one-roomed, one-chimney house" where Heaney got his first haircut, "Senior Infants" looks back at primary school. Yet for all his Irish rootedness, Heaney's newest work remains international (poems set in the London Underground, the Danish bog where he set famous earlier poems, and in a warm and pleasant Italy) and unboundedly global: one of the strongest short lyrics, "Hofn," wonders at a newly melting glacier, anxious about global warming, yet astonished by the ice's remaining immensities, its "grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff," "its coldness that still seemed enough/ To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath." (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Nobel prize winner Heaney's (Death of a Naturalist) latest collection of robust lyrics celebrates work, memory, and the physicality of existence. Brimming with anvils, hammers, shovels, and pumps, 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: "Contrary, unflowery/ sky-whisk and bristle, more/ twig-fret than fruit-fort,/ crabbed/ as crabbed could be-/ that was the tree/ I remembered." For Heaney, the tongue is the muscle best suited to the hard work of animating the past, as in the sonnet sequence "District and Circle," in which he re-creates the movement of a subway ride taken decades earlier: "So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,/ My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,/ My father's glazed face in my own waning/ And craning...." His is an uncompromising Irish tongue-a rural one, at that-and the gravitas he invests in unfamiliar objects will leave some American readers cold, but there is no question that Heaney's poetry presents the "mass and majesty of this world" with unparalleled vigor. Recommended.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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