Seamus Heaneys new collection starts in an age of bare hands & cast iron & ends as the automatic lock/clunks shut in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twentieth-first century. In their haunted almost visionary clarity the poems assay the weight & worth of what has been held in the hand & 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 & other images from the dangerous present
- a journey on the underground a melting glacier
- are fraught with this same anxiety. But District & Circle" which
Includes:: a number of prose poems & translations offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers & stands his ground in the hiding places of love & excited language. In a sequence like " The Tollund Man in Springtime" & in several poems which do the rounds of the district
- its known roads & rivers & trees its familiar & unfamiliar ghosts
- the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish & conviction than ever Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities & the mystery of everyday renewals."