Seamus Heaney's 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 twenty-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."