Seamus Heaney's new collection begins "in an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends "as the automatic lock / clunks shut" in the unsettling new conditions of a threatened twenty-first century. In their haunting, almost visionary clarity, the poems explore the weight and significance of what has been held in the hand and in memory.

Images from a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II—railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight silence" of cattle in the 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 infused with this same anxiety.

But District and Circle, which includes several prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his strength and stands his ground in the hidden places of love and passionate language. In sequences like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems that "do the rounds of the district"—its known roads, rivers, and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts—the gravity of remembrance is transformed into the grace of recollection.

With more enthusiasm and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney affirms his trust in the stubbornness of everyday realities and the mystery of daily renewals: Again the growl / Of shutting doors, the jolt and unique treble / Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal / Haulage of speed through every dragging socket. (from "District and Circle")

Pages: 88, Dimensions: 13.1x13.1cm