District and Circle
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Authors: Seamus Heaney
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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. 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 present—a fireman’s helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier—are 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 district”—its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts—threats to the planet are intuited in the local place, yet a lyric force prevails. With more relish and conviction than ever, Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.
ALSO BY SEAMUS HEANEY
POETRY
Death of a Naturalist
Door into the Dark
Wintering Out
North
Field Work
Poems 1965–1975
Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish
Station Island
The Haw Lantern
Selected Poems 1966–1987
Seeing Things
Sweeney’s Flight
(with photographs by Rachel Giese)
The Spirit Level
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996
Beowulf
Diary of One Who Vanished
Electric Light
CRITICISM
Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978
The Government of the Tongue
The Redress of Poetry
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001
PLAYS
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone
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District and Circle. Copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney.
All rights reserved.
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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 Augusta
Because we arrived in August, and from now on
This month’s baled hay and blackberries and combines
Will spell Augusta’s bounty.
To George Seferis in the Underworld
3. One Christmas Day in the Morning
Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road
To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff
1. A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth
2. A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden
Cavafy: “The rest I’ll speak of to the ones below in Hades”
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 Janáček’s “Diary of One Who Vanished” (Gaiety Theatre, 14–16 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 Beaton’s
George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel
(Yale University Press, 2003).
“The soul exceeds its circumstances” (p. 56) is quoted from Leon Wieseltier’s 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 O’Donoghue
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 winter’s 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 they’d 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 I’d lie
Listening for the goods from Castledawson …
Each languid, clanking waggon,
And afterwards,
rust, thistles, silence, sky.
“We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood
Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road
They would have heard the squealing,
Then heard it stop and had a view of us
In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.
Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.
Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.
Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,
Hosting for Normandy.
Not that we knew then
Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters
As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.”
1.
Kit-bag to tool-bag,
Warshirt to workshirt—
Out of your element
Among farmer in-laws,
The way you tied sheaves
The talk of the country,
But out on your own
When skylined on scaffolds—
A demobbed Achilles
Who was never a killer,
The strongest instead
Of the world’s stretcher-bearers,
Turning your hand
To the bricklaying trade.
Prince of the sandpiles,
Hod-hoplite commander
Watching the wall,
Plumbing and pointing
From pegged-out foundation
To first course to cornice,
Keeping an eye
On the eye in the level
Before the cement set:
Medical orderly,
Bedpanner, bandager
Transferred to the home front,
Rising and shining
In brass-buttoned drab.
You spoke of “the forces,”
Had served in the desert,
Been strafed and been saved
By courses of blankets
Fresh-folded and piled
Like bales on a field.
No sandbags that time.
A softness preserved you.
You spoke of sex also,
Talked man to man,
Took me for granted:
The English, you said,
Would do it on Sundays
Upstairs, in the daytime.
The weight of the trowel,
That’s what surprised me.
You’d lift its lozenge-shaped
Blade in the air
To sever a brick
In a flash, and then twirl it
Fondly and lightly.
But whenever you sent me
To wash it and dry it
And you had your smoke,
Its iron was heavy,
Its sloped-angle handle
So thick-spanned and daunting
I needed two hands.
“To Mick Joyce in Heaven”—
The title just came to me,
Mick, and I started
If not quite from nowhere,
Then somewhere far off: