District and Circle: Poems

✍ Scribed by Heaney, Seamus

• Book ID: 108209110
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 89 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781466855496

✦ Synopsis

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"...