District and circle

District and circle
20,95 €
Sense existències ara
Rep-lo a casa en 2 / 3 dies per Missatger o Eco Enviament*
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 centrifual
Haulage of speed through every
dragging socket.