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: Again the growl of shutting doors, the jolt
and one-off treble of iron on iron, then a long
centrifugal Haulage of speed through every dragging
socket. (from ''District and Circle''). |
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