District and Circle
by Seamus Heaney
Faber & Faber £12.99, 96 pages
The title of this collection, District and Circle, appears to suggest that Seamus Heaney has suddenly turned urban with his 12th book, abandoning his guttural bogs and earthy anecdotes for the bright lights of the big city. But a glance at the contents page reveals quite the opposite: “The Turnip-Snedder”, “Anahorish 1944”, “The Harrow-Pin”, “The Tollund Man in Springtime”. The poems gathered here circle about the district of Heaney’s legendary terrain, infusing with his compelling mixture of linguistic delight and moral weight all they contemplate.
The title poem does, it is true, take place on the London Underground. But Heaney presents his trip on the Tube as an epic descent into hellish nether regions, overlaying it with allusions to Aeneas’s journey to the underworld to speak with his father in Virgil’s Aeneid. Despite the tenuousness of the analogy, one can’t help but marvel at Heaney’s ability to convey the experience of strap-hanging, which he renders in full somatic detail from “planted ball of heel to heel of hand”, precisely evoking his Tube traveller’s stance - “well girded, yet on edge, / Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof”, all the time clinging to his “stubby black roof wort”. Tube travel for Heaney is the opposite of the good life. The poem ends in a nightmare vision of subterranean enclosure, as he imagines hurtling alone amid ghostly crowds through “galleried earth”, staring at his own reflection “in a window mirror- backed / By blasted weeping rock-walls. / Flicker-lit”.
There are many additions to Heaney’s lexicon of arresting compounds: “rubble-bolts”, “seedling-braird”, “gutter-blood”, “grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff” (this describes a melting glacier viewed from the air). Heaney’s poems have always savoured the sound of words with an almost visceral relish, and the experience of translating Beowulf (1999) thickened the textures of his language further. At times in his previous volume, Electric Light (2001), his idiom seemed in danger of curdling into mannerism. But District and Circle had me swooning all over again at his rhythmic balance, the delicate force of his diction, the power of his poetry to render the weight - or weightlessness - of what he describes.
In “Tollund Man in Springtime” he returns to the ancient corpse preserved in peat that inspired the great bog poems of North - but this time without the political analogies that caused such a furore in 1975. Tollund man now seems more troubled by pollution, “exhaust fumes, silage reek”, and is figured pondering “wired, far-faced smilers” queuing at check-out lines. But reconsideration of the corpse does retrigger Heaney’s intense fascination with a body saturated for centuries with earth - the “snailskin lid” of his eye, his “webbed wrists” splaying like silver birches.
As a whole, District and Circle evinces an obdurate faith in the kinds of objects (that turnip-snedder, an anvil, a stove lid) and landscapes and exemplary - normally simple - lives that Heaney’s poetry has always celebrated. His circlings of his district include homages to poetic ancestors and influences through translations (here of Horace, Rilke and Cavafy - all outstanding), and commemorations of such poets as Ted Hughes, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda and Dorothy and William Wordsworth. His own place in the pantheon has long been secure: this book restates his case for an honoured niche with his customary craftsmanship, gravitas, eloquence and passion.
Mark Ford is professor of English at University College London.
