Heaney\'s new collection of poetry maintains his trust in the implacableness of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.
Eliot Prize for Poetry..
District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.
S.
With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.
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.
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.
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 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 fraught with this same anxiety.
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.
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.
Heaney\'s new collection of poetry maintains his trust in the implacableness of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals
