Two Poems:
"The Nod"
"A Clip"
from Seamus Heaney's
District and Circle

Seamus Heaney:

Seamus Heaney's first collection, Death of a Naturalist, appeared forty years ago. Since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Photo © Keith Barnes)

About District and Circle:

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. Scenes from a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present – a fireman’s helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety.

But the volume, which includes some "found prose" and a number of translations, offers resistance as Heaney 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 – threats to the planet are intuited in the local place, yet a lyric force prevails. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

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