District and Circle: Poems [Paperback]

Seamus Heaney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0374530815 | ISBN-13: 978-0374530815 | Edition: 1st

District and Circle inhabits 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 far 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" 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. With more relish and conviction than ever, Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics describe Heaney's newest book of poetry as original, startling, authentic, even supernatural—and his strongest collection in two decades. Reminiscent of his earliest collections in its earth-and-labor-centered vision, this volume is all the wiser with hindsight. While displaying a similar sensitivity toward humans, the same lyricism (a subway strap is "a stubby black roof-wort"), and a familiar down-to-earth attitude, District and Circle also asks questions about our impact on Earth. Latin and Gaelic words, as well as references to Dante and Greek myth, may have some readers scrabbling for the dictionary—but even for them, reading Heaney's poems is entirely worth the effort.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374530815
• ISBN-13: 978-0374530815
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #462,443 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Early candor yields to late wonder, June 3, 2006

By 

Anonymous Lover of Beauty - See all my reviews

This review is from: District and Circle: Poems (Hardcover)

I must admit that I expected to be disappointed with this latest effort. Mr. Heaney started his career with some of the best poetry in English since we lost Wallace Stevens. His first collection, "Death of A Naturalist" is unnaturally strong. He arrived a absolute master of metrics and music; this reader still marvels at those early lyrics, often singing them to himself---elegiac, packed with memorable imagery...poems with a very strong sense of the past (which must have been refreshing after "The Pound and Elliot era"...an era that, in my humble estimation, shut more doors than it opened), but which were unique and spoke to the Right Now. Heaney built on this "early candor" in successive volumes, but I have been depressed by his more recent work. It has settled into that super-literate backslapping, in-circle, kissing-their-own-hands academic verse that we are literally drowning in right now. Heaney has always been a learned poet, and to his readers delight--but in his early years he remained apart from the workshop and the lecture hall. With his appointment at various universities, I'm afraid his work has changed. His many poetic friendships I'm sure are enriching, but do we have to read about them? I wish more poets would have the courage of, say, a W.S. Merwin, contributing translations, keeping the bar high, but nevertheless standing apart from "the scene". Well, digression aside, Mr.Heany's new work is superb. The lyrics are grounded--in metaphors of work, of change, of loss. The lyrics are varied; so is the music--and in verbal music, Heaney has no peer. For years, the late James Merril vied with him for that laurel crown--now Heaney stands alone, and here he makes a sound that is touching, vivid, often incantatory, full of squelch and belch. Here we have a poet at blossoming into a late wonder.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smoking Irish peat, January 9, 2007

By 

Sheelagh O'Connor (Santa Monica) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: District and Circle: Poems (Hardcover)

It felt as if a piece of smoking Irish peat had been flung in my door when this little paperback arrived in Santa Monica, California. The pages are alive with Ireland, the thoughts and feelings I had forgotten or never knew how to acknowledge.

"There was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out."
The unseen and untouchable are tangible here. I love it all.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars District & Circle, July 8, 2007

By 

Michael Daley - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: District and Circle: Poems (Paperback)

The title poem alone is worth the admission price. A great work, "Tollund Man" and other poems harken back to early Heaney--an elder echo to North, Wintering Out and Door Into the Dark.