District and Circle (Faber Poetry) - Softcover

Heaney, Seamus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571279414 ISBN 13: 9780571279418

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2011

Synopsis

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 centrifugal / Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.

(from 'District and Circle')

About this title

About the Author:

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.District and Circle was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Stepping Stones, a book of interviews by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Human Chain was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Review:

Praise for "Electric Light:
"Heaney's status as one of the most significant poets writing in English and the greatest Irish poet since Yeats in already well established. "Electric Light is further confirmation of his power to capture and transcend the immediacy of the moment, to find the stillness at the heart of things." --Joe Treasure," Los Angeles Times Book Review
""Electric Light includes poems that are sparks of fulminating retrospection . . . To say it the best I can . . . [Heaney] exercises poetry's power to proclaim truth and the artist's power to make us know that it is a truth we can't be without . . . Engagement is the heart of a poem . . . and Mr. Heaney's strongest engagement in this collection is with time: the past that lives, the present that dies." --Richard Eder, "The New York Times

Praise for "Electric Light":
"Heaney's status as one of the most significant poets writing in English and the greatest Irish poet since Yeats in already well established. "Electric Light" is further confirmation of his power to capture and transcend the immediacy of the moment, to find the stillness at the heart of things." --Joe Treasure," Los Angeles Times Book Review
"""Electric Light" includes poems that are sparks of fulminating retrospection . . . To say it the best I can . . . İHeaney¨ exercises poetry's power to proclaim truth and the artist's power to make us know that it is a truth we can't be without . . . Engagement is the heart of a poem . . . and Mr. Heaney's strongest engagement in this collection is with time: the past that lives, the present that dies." --Richard Eder, "The New York Times"

" A book as original, startling and aesthetically compelling as any since his magisterial 1984 sequence, "Station Island," " -- "The Washington Post Book World""" " [Heaney' s] voice carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken-- even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say." -- Brad Leithauser, "The New York Times Book Review"

"A book as original, startling and aesthetically compelling as any since his magisterial 1984 sequence, "Station Island,"" --"The Washington Post Book World""" "[Heaney's] voice carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken--even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say." --Brad Leithauser, "The New York Times Book Review"

"A book as original, startling and aesthetically compelling as any since his magisterial 1984 sequence, "Station Island". " --"The Washington Post Book World""" "[Heaney's] voice carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken--even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say." --Brad Leithauser, "The New York Times Book Review"

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571279414
• ISBN 13: 9780571279418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96