-
District and Circle (Paperback)
Short Description for District and CircleA collection that 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. This title 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.
Full description- Publisher: Faber and Faber
- Published: 03 November 2011
- Format: Paperback 96 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Poetry By Individual Poets
- ISBN 13: 9780571279418 ISBN 10: 0571279414
- Sales rank: 199,033
Other books
Full description for 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. 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").
