Heaney - District and Circle

USA $20.00 Seamus Heaneys 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. Scenes from a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that Anything can happen, and other images from the dangerous presenta firemans helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacierare 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 that do the rounds of the districtits known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghoststhreats to the planet are intuited in the local place, yet a lyric force prevails. ALSO BY SEAMUS HEANEY POETRY Death of a NaturalistDoor into the DarkWintering OutNorthField WorkPoems 19651975Sweeney Astray: A Version from the IrishStation IslandThe Haw LanternSelected Poems 19661987Seeing ThingsSweeneys Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese) The Spirit LevelOpened Ground: Selected Poems 19661996BeowulfDiary of One Who VanishedElectric Light CRITICISM Preoccupations: Selected Prose 19681978The Government of the TongueThe Redress of PoetryFinders Keepers: Selected Prose 19712001 PLAYS The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles PhiloctetesThe Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles Antigone The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. ALSO BY SEAMUS HEANEY POETRY Death of a NaturalistDoor into the DarkWintering OutNorthField WorkPoems 19651975Sweeney Astray: A Version from the IrishStation IslandThe Haw LanternSelected Poems 19661987Seeing ThingsSweeneys Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese) The Spirit LevelOpened Ground: Selected Poems 19661996BeowulfDiary of One Who VanishedElectric Light CRITICISM Preoccupations: Selected Prose 19681978The Government of the TongueThe Redress of PoetryFinders Keepers: Selected Prose 19712001 PLAYS The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles PhiloctetesThe Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles Antigone The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only.

You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. District and Circle. Copyright 2006 by Seamus Heaney. All rights reserved.

For information, address FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX 19 Union Square West, New York 10003 e-ISBN 978-1-4668-5549-6 First eBook Edition: September 2013 FOR ANN SADDLEMYER
Because we arrived in Augu Call her AugustaBecause we arrived in August, and from now onThis months baled hay and blackberries and combinesWill spell Augustas bounty.

These poems first appeared, many in slightly different versions, in Agenda, Agni, Harvard Review, Irish Pages, Metre, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Pretext II, The Guardian, Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, Scintilla, London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Salmagundi, Tatler, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Yellow Nib, Village, Waxwing Poems. A number of the poems also appeared in A Shiver (Clutag, 2005). Anything Can Happen, along with a short essay and several translations, was included in a publication with that same title (Amnesty/Town House, 2004). Tall Dames is adapted from A Gate Left Open, a programme note for the Dublin performance of Janeks Diary of One Who Vanished (Gaiety Theatre, 1416 October 1999); Saw Music appeared in The Door Stands Open (Irish Writers Centre, 2005). On the Spot was commissioned by Maurice Riordan and John Burnside for their anthology, Wild Reckoning (Picador, 2004). The lines quoted in To George Seferis in the Underworld are from his poem On Aspalathoi, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Complete Poems, Princeton University Press, 1995); the epigraph is from Roderick Beatons George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel (Yale University Press, 2003). 56) is quoted from Leon Wieseltiers appreciation of Czeslaw Milosz, The New York Times Book Review, 12 September 2004. B-Men (p. 34) were the auxiliary B-Special Force of the former Royal Ulster Constabulary. For Hughie ODonoghue In an age of bare hands and cast iron, the clamp-on meat-mincer, the double flywheeled water-pump, it dug its heels in among wooden tubs and troughs of slops, hotter than body heat in summertime, cold in winter as winters body armour, a barrel-chested breast-plate standing guard on four braced greaves. For Hughie ODonoghue In an age of bare hands and cast iron, the clamp-on meat-mincer, the double flywheeled water-pump, it dug its heels in among wooden tubs and troughs of slops, hotter than body heat in summertime, cold in winter as winters body armour, a barrel-chested breast-plate standing guard on four braced greaves.

This is the way that God sees life, it said, from seedling-braird to snedder, as the handle turned and turnip-heads were let fall and fed to the juiced-up inner blades, This is the turnip-cycle, as it dropped its raw sliced mess, bucketful by glistering bucketful.

The way you had to stand to swing the sledge, Your two knees locked, your lower back shock-fast As shields in a testudo, spine and waist A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage; The way its iron head planted the sledge Unyieldingly as a club-footed last; The way you had to heft and then half-rest Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage About to be let fly: does it do you good To have known it in your bones, directable, Withholdable at will, A first blow that could make air of a wall, A last one so unanswerably landed The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle? Once theyd been block-built criss-cross and four-squared We lived with them and breathed pure creosote Until they were laid and landscaped in a kerb, A moulded verge, half-skirting, half-stockade, Soon fringed with hardy ground-cover and grass. But as that bulwark bleached in sun and rain And the washed gravel pathway showed no stain, Under its parched riverbed Flinch and crunch I imagined tarry pus Accruing, bearing forward to the garden Wafts of what conspired when Id lie Listening for the goods from Castledawson Each languid, clanking waggon, And afterwards,