Books of the Month

'District and Circle' by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney’s latest collection, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was nominated for several others, covers a lot of ground. There’s much that will be familiar to long-term fans of the Irish Nobel Laureate: poems like ‘The Turnip-Snedder’ and ‘A Clip’, which hark back to simple rural ways of living and working, memorials to absent friends (‘To Mick Joyce in Heaven’, ‘The Lift’, ‘Chairing Mary’), and conversations with literary forebears – including George Seferis, Wordsworth and Edward Thomas. There’s even a resurrection (literally, as it turns out) for the bog-preserved Tollund Man who first appeared over thirty years ago in the collection Wintering Out:

‘I reawoke to revel in the spirit
They strengthened when they chose to put me down
For their own good. And to a sixth-sensed threat’   
                            (‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’)

That sense of threat is an undercurrent throughout the book. When it comes to confronting politics and public matters, Heaney has always preferred to celebrate the local and the familiar. In a twentieth century where ‘Anything Can Happen’, the reassurances of the known and the real become even more important, yet things are far from always being black and white. Several poems which revisit the villages and buildings and faces of the poet’s childhood, for instance, carry hints of sinister threat. In the ‘one-room, one-chimney room’ which doubles as the local barbers, the poet remembers:

‘The strong-armed chair, the plain mysteriousness
Of your sheeted self inside that neck-tied cope –
Half-sleeveless surplice, half hoodless Ku Klux cape.’   

                            (‘A Clip’)

The collection ends with ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’, and when Heaney writes ‘It’s you, blackbird, I love’, his conscious choice is to focus on the love of simple things, and the natural world. And, of course, on love itself.

Susan Tranter
 

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