District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

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 I - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the heavyweight / Silence of Cattle out in rain - are colored 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.

District and Circle is the winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award and the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Heaney, Seamus: - Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374140922
ISBN 10	0374140928
Title	District and Circle
Author	Seamus Heaney
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus And Giroux
Year published	2006-05-30
Number of pages	78
Prizes	Short-listed for Costa Book Awards (Poetry) 2006
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.