The poet’s death on August 30, 2013, prompted me to search through my piles and shelves of unread books to see if perchance I had one more collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry that I hadn’t yet devoured. For the moment I ignored the long shelf of read Heaney. After some searching I found District and Circle, his next to last collection, from 2006. So I began reading (and then pulled down the previously read Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1998) and the two other collections published after Opened Ground, Electric Light (2001) and Human Chain (2010). The reading, new and familiar, was a good way to focus on Heaney’s life rather than his death.Heaney has always been a poet of memory, personal and cultural, as well as a poet of the present, the observed moment. In either mode there is loss and gift, continuity and passing, and, always that inventive, precise, lyrical, evocative noticing of detail: of sound, image, aroma, taste and touch. “He’s not in view but I can hear a step / On the grass-crowned road, the whip of daisy heads / On the toe of boots.” (from “Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road”) “Milk-fevered river. / Froth at the mouth / of the discharge pipe, / gidsome flotsam… // Barefooted on the bank, / glad-eyed, ankle-grassed, / I saw it all / and loved it at the time -- // blettings, beestings, / creamery spillage / on her clearly, comely / sally trees and alders.” (from “Moyulla”) “Saturday evenings we would stand in line / In Loudan’s butcher shop. Red beef, white string, / Brown paper ripped straight off for parceling / Along the counter edge.” (from “The Nod”). These are just random grabs from the collection. There are also able translations from Rilke and Cavafy. And prose poems, including this one, which I’ll close with, the first part of “Found Prose”: 1. The Lagans Road “The Lagans Road ran for about three quarters of a mile across an area of wetlands. It was one of those narrow country roads with weeds in the middle, grass verges and high hedges on either side, and all around it marsh and rushes and little shrubs and birch trees. For a minute or two every day, therefore, you were in the wilderness, but on the first morning I went to school it was as if the queen of elfland was leading me away. The McNicholls were neighbours and Philomena McNicholl had been put in charge of me during those first days. Ginger hair, freckled face, green gymfrock—a fey, if ever there was one. I remember my first sight of the school, a couple of low-set Nissen huts raising their corrugated backs above the hedges. From about a quarter of a mile away I could see youngsters running about in the road in front of the buildings and hear shouting in the playground. Years later, when I read an account of how the Indians of the Pacific Northwest foresaw their arrival in the land of the dead—coming along a forest path where other travellers’ cast-offs lay scattered on the bushes, hearing voices laughing and calling, knowing there was a life in the clearing up ahead that would be familiar, but feeling at the same time lost and homesick—it struck me I had already experienced that kind of arrival. Next thing in the porch I was faced with rows of coathooks nailed up at different heights along the wall, so that everyone in the different classes could reach them, everyone had a place to hang overcoat or scarf and proceed to the strange room, where our names were new in the rollbook and would soon be called.”
The Edgeware Road Station on the London Underground marks the convergence of the Circle Line with the District Line. It is also the sight of the July, 2005, terrorist bombings. In District and Circle by Seamus Heaney there is a convergence of many circles, youth to old-age, rural to urban, mechanical to electronic, fleeting to eternal, concrete to abstract, familiar to distant. In a strong lyric voice Heaney presents a grounded realism that keeps the images from being mere abstractions. In his Nobel lecture, Heaney commended the achievement of W.B. Yeats, whose “work does what the necessary poetry does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.” Heaney has certainly achieved the same in his work.
What do You think about District And Circle (2007)?
I came to Heaney primarily through the recommendations in my reading of Ted Hughes. He does not disappoint. Plain, hard-hitting lyricism, such as in:"So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,/ My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,/ My father's glazed face in my own waning/ And craning...""District and Circle", last section). And Hughes's sense of the natural, rural world, meshed with the internal, as in: "My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Eat to the ground./ My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid."
—Brian
When I first read Seamus Heaney's poetry I was blown away. His artful use of dialogue, rhythm, annd description are the perfect tools for crafitng poetry. Yet, I felt that this collection fell short of my expectations. His telltale skills are still present, but I felt that the scope of the subject of this collection was far too broad. He focuses on "normal" life in Ireland, but he stretches it all the way from the legendary Tollund Man (a historical subject) to modern city infrastructures. The dichotomy of the two subjects could easily have complimented eachother artistically, but I don't think Heaney quite managed to bridge that gap. The closest he got to bridging the past and the present were the poems to and about other Irish poets like Auden and Hughes, and that's really just name dropping, even if he is connected to them in the Irish poetic traditions.
—Jaimie
Modern poetry is a hard and unforgiving art. Eschewing rhyme, meter, and well-worn structure puts the focus so much more on other aspects of poetic diction such as metaphor, motif, evocative mood, or word choice. When one of those strikes you in the face, it can be really something but when those don't work (in both the objective and subjective sense), it can be really dissatisfying.This collection had a few gems (for example, Helmet, The Tollund Man in Springtime, or The Blackbird of Glanmore), but it didn't quite live up to the quality of the earlier collection I read, Field Work. When Heaney succeeds for me it is often when he is evoking the mythic and early historic past of his homeland and mixing it with the modern experience.
—Dave Maddock
