District and Circle

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From the Dust Jacket: 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, these poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Scenes from a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are coloured by a strongly contemporary sense that 'anything can happen' and other images from the dangerous present-a fireman's helmet, a journey on the underground, a melting glacier-are fraught with this same anxiety. But the volume, which includes some 'found prose' and a number of translations, offers resistance as Heaney 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-threats to the planet are intuited in the local place, yet a lyric force prevails. With more relish and conviction than ever, Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals