Distrito y Circular / Distric and Circle

by Seamus Heaney

《区线与环线》是诺贝尔文学奖得主希尼的第12部诗集，于2006年出版并于当年获得英国最富盛名的诗歌奖艾略特奖（the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry），2007年现代诗歌奖（winner of the 2007 Poetry Now award）。这部诗集既有对当前世界最严峻的政治问题的关注，也有对前辈诗人的致敬和缅怀。但整部诗集中起支撑作用的，还是诗人一贯的对自己从小生活 和成长的地方，那里的人和事的回忆与记录。那里的道路、河流和树木，那里的邻居、同学和亲友。这些不同的主题相互呼应，童年记忆与时代问题相互交织，历史与现实彼此回响，构成了一个紧密关联又激烈冲突的世界，一个有着历史景深和统一空间的活生生的社会，又透出一种恩典般的精神之光。希尼保持着对现实生活的冷静观察和对内心情感的温暖信任，真实、朴素、深刻地写出了一个真实存在的世界，一个充满意义的、迷人的世界，为我们建造了一个强大的抵御虚无与混乱的精神栖居地。

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature, Nobel Prize, Fiction, Literature, Adult

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 2006

About the author

Works of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections Wintering Out (1972) and Field Work (1979) as well as a translation of Beowulf (1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney on Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a surprising disappointment. I remember loving Heaney when I studied him on my semester abroad in Ireland; but now I'm left wondering if that was because of its relevancy to my life at the time and/or I was *studying* it so putting a bit more than casual reading into the text. But honestly these poems didn't really speak to me at this time in my life. Maybe I'm just not in the headspace for his poetry right now, but this took almost two full months for me to read because I never really got excited about picking it up. A few highlights but overall not that enticing.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this many times. Here's the the language that excited me on today's reading:

from "A Shiver"

The way you had to heft and then half-rest
Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage

The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle

from "Anahorish 1944"

A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood

from "To Mick Joyce in Heaven"

The English, you said,
would do it on Sundays
Upstairs, in the daytime.

from "District and Circle"

As the music larked and capered

Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet

Sunners lay on body-heated mown grass

from "The Harrow Pin"

From harrows wrecked by horse-power over stones

Out there, in musts of bedding cut with piss

from "Sugan"

Hay being coaxed in handfuls from a ruck

Turned and tightened, rickety-rick to rope

from "Senior Infants"

Lost her head and cut the legs off us

Bog-bank brown, embossed, forbidden man-fruit

The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to

I remember his air-gun broken over his forearm, my envy of the polished hardwood stock, him thumbing the pellets into their aperture. The snick of the thing then as he clipped it shut and danced with his eye on the sights through a quick-quick angle of ninety degrees and back, then drilled the pair of us left-right to the back of the house.

from "The Nod"

But seeping blood. Like dead weight in a sling

from "A Clip"

Cold smooth creeping steel, and snicking scissors.

Weeds shoulder-high up to the open door.

from "Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road"

He's not in view but I can hear a step
On the grass-crowned road, the whip of daisy heads
On the toes of boots.

And now the road is empty.
Nothing but air and light between their love-nest
And the bracken hillside where I lie alone.

from "In Iowa"

I saw, abandoned in the open gap
Of a field where wilted corn-stalks flagged the snow,
A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,
Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow
And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.

from "The Tollund Man in Springtime"

Coming and going, neither god nor ghost

Its very smoke a sullen waft of swamp-breath

from "Planting the Alder"

For the scut and scat of cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle

from "Quitting Time"

He'll wait a while before he kills the light.

from "The Birch Grove"

At the back of the garden, in earshot of river water

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fabulous collection of poetry by Heaney. I think my favourite part of his work is the wonderful imagery he uses... or is it the masterful wordsmithery? It’s all good, man.

A Shiver

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
Unyielding 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 the could make air of a wall,
A last one so unanswerably landed
The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?

My next book: Where There is Nothing

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poet’s death on August 30, 2013, prompted me to search through my piles and shelves of unread books to see if perchance I had one more collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry that I hadn’t yet devoured. For the moment I ignored the long shelf of read Heaney. After some searching I found District and Circle, his next to last collection, from 2006. So I began reading (and then pulled down the previously read Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1998) and the two other collections published after Opened Ground, Electric Light (2001) and Human Chain (2010). The reading, new and familiar, was a good way to focus on Heaney’s life rather than his death.

Heaney has always been a poet of memory, personal and cultural, as well as a poet of the present, the observed moment. In either mode there is loss and gift, continuity and passing, and, always that inventive, precise, lyrical, evocative noticing of detail: of sound, image, aroma, taste and touch. “He’s not in view but I can hear a step / On the grass-crowned road, the whip of daisy heads / On the toe of boots.” (from “Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road”) “Milk-fevered river. / Froth at the mouth / of the discharge pipe, / gidsome flotsam… // Barefooted on the bank, / glad-eyed, ankle-grassed, / I saw it all / and loved it at the time -- // blettings, beestings, / creamery spillage / on her clearly, comely / sally trees and alders.” (from “Moyulla”) “Saturday evenings we would stand in line / In Loudan’s butcher shop. Red beef, white string, / Brown paper ripped straight off for parceling / Along the counter edge.” (from “The Nod”). These are just random grabs from the collection. There are also able translations from Rilke and Cavafy. And prose poems, including this one, which I’ll close with, the first part of “Found Prose”:
1. The Lagans Road

“The Lagans Road ran for about three quarters of a mile across an area of wetlands. It was one of those narrow country roads with weeds in the middle, grass verges and high hedges on either side, and all around it marsh and rushes and little shrubs and birch trees. For a minute or two every day, therefore, you were in the wilderness, but on the first morning I went to school it was as if the queen of elfland was leading me away. The McNicholls were neighbours and Philomena McNicholl had been put in charge of me during those first days. Ginger hair, freckled face, green gymfrock—a fey, if ever there was one. I remember my first sight of the school, a couple of low-set Nissen huts raising their corrugated backs above the hedges. From about a quarter of a mile away I could see youngsters running about in the road in front of the buildings and hear shouting in the playground. Years later, when I read an account of how the Indians of the Pacific Northwest foresaw their arrival in the land of the dead—coming along a forest path where other travellers’ cast-offs lay scattered on the bushes, hearing voices laughing and calling, knowing there was a life in the clearing up ahead that would be familiar, but feeling at the same time lost and homesick—it struck me I had already experienced that kind of arrival. Next thing in the porch I was faced with rows of coathooks nailed up at different heights along the wall, so that everyone in the different classes could reach them, everyone had a place to hang overcoat or scarf and proceed to the strange room, where our names were new in the rollbook and would soon be called.”

[Tim Rideout · Rating 5 out of 5]

'There was never a scene / when I had it out with myself or with another. / The loss occurred off-stage. And yet I cannot / disavow words like "thanksgiving" or "host" / or "communion bread". They have an undying / tremor and draw, like well water far down.'

'Out of This World' 1. 'Like everybody else...''

We are all products of our experiences, our memories. They are inescapable and relentless. In 'District and Circle' Heaney applies his genius to the exploration of his childhood, memories of the war, nature, the Catholic faith and culture, and the Troubles, revisiting his own construction.

The language is visceral, natural and old, each and every poem standing testament to Heaney's status as one of the finest poets of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

[Dirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are somewhat difficult poems to read at first. They are not difficult because of encyclopedic obscure references, like, say, Pound, or because of solipsistic personal references like, say, John Ashbury, or because of meterless syntactic and semantic experimentation like so much contemporary poetry. The syntax is strictly gramatic, but constantly requires and rewards your full attention, like a stony path. There are many obscure, but always concrete and evocative words, drawn mostly form the everyday language of insular early 20th century country life, like Hardy. You have to chew these poems, but they are wonderfully flavorful, human, vivid, moving, and thoughtful.

[Chris Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heaney grapples with the clash of the urban and the rural, the ancient and the modern in this, his latest book of poetry. I wouldn't recommend this book to someone new to Heaney's work, as it is much less accessible than some of his earlier works, but after some time to reflect on this book and compare it to his others, I have to say that District and Circle is among my favorites.

If you're looking for a place to start with Heaney though, Death of a Naturalist is a much better place to begin.

[Shoaib · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book is just okay, the second half has poems that are absolutely beautiful! Some of the best poems, in my opinion, are A Hagging Match, The Birch Grove, and Cavafy: The rest I'll speak off to the one's below in Hades.

Here's an example of Heaney at his best:

If self is a location, so is love
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels and distance,
Here and there, now and then, a stance.

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think these recent poems of Heaney's are compelling, especially the way he makes the ordinary imbued with extraordinary features. But I quite prefer his earlier poems when the themes dealt more concretely with Irish mythology, history, and politics. Nevertheless, his sparse and crisp images are intriguing and beautiful.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really, what're you gonna say, the guy's a fecking Nobel laureate. I was lost in some of the first poems, not knowing the terminology (Irish or rural or both). The language is so musical, though. Jaysus.

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a changing world, poetry is as much an exposition as a consolation. The terrible beauty written here asks readers to reflect on memory and evaluate the importance of objects as triggers for memory.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

District and Circle, Heaney’s penultimate collection, while perhaps lacking the immediate impact of the books that had made his name, has a slow burning and lasting power. Several poems look back at his childhood and early adulthood (particularly powerful are the exercises in prose poetry like One Christmas Day in the Morning and The Lagans Road), but, for me, the standout piece is The Tollund Man in Springtime, a collection of six sonnets revisiting one of Heaney’s most richly mined seams, the millennia-old sacrificed bodies of men and women preserved in peat bogs in Denmark and Ireland.

[Malcolm Hebron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, visionary poetry (why does the blurb say 'almost visionary'? What does that even mean?) which transforms the world even as it describes it. An old fireman's helmet, a turnip shredder, a coal scuttle, a harrow pin - ordinary objects become the focal points of memory and rewarders of the spirit's attention. A triptych of poems in memory of Czeslaw Millosz describes a man in a Belfast doorway playing saw music, a music that Milosz 'would not have renounced, however paltry'. And Heaney adopts this same openness to the small, 'the paltry'. The contemplation is rooted in the physical heft and texture of things: 'For the dark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped / And pigeon-collared' ('Planting the Alder'). And from this deep imaginative immersion in the material world we are led to a sense, a physical sensation really, of transcendence. Astonishing imagery and phrases run through the book: what alchemy gives us a windscreen wiper's 'strong absolving slumps and flits', the 'snailskin lid' of 'The Tollund Man in Springtime' (taking us back to the world of North)? Heaney's relish for words carries us along with it, taking in the 'blettings, beestings' of the river 'Moyulla', the 'scut and scat of cones in winter'. The District is familiar - the Irish rural landscape, elegies, tributes to the masters (Auden, Cavafy, Rilke, Seferis), the world of childhood - yet nothing seems rehearsed or effortful. The poet goes over old ground, with untiring curiosity bringing forth its graces, from the late stages of the writer's journey back to the boggy peat where it began. Coming full Circle.

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

“District and Circle” is a collection of 44 poems by the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney that was released in 2006.

One feels the essence of the 20th century across this collection. There are a couple poems that refer to World War II, not from the perspective of crucial events and violent clashes, but as it was experienced in “the District” (e.g. “Anahorish 1944.”)

There are also a number of poems that make industrialization romantic or—at least, in some way--evocative. Heaney writes of mechanical devices and processes in a way that many great nature poems are composed (e.g. the first poem in the collection “The Turnip-Snedder.”) In fact, it’s almost like industrial haiku. It doesn’t share the brevity of Japanese form, but it removes the extraneous and deals in only what one can experience with the senses. In that way, one can feel the heft of these objects. They aren’t cheap, flimsy plastic, but wood and iron and brass. There are also some lovely nature poems.

Heaney’s use of language is resplendent. It’s not just the description, but the sound. I’ve even found myself thinking, “I don’t know what that word means, but—damn--it sounds gorgeous right there.”

The poems range from several words to a few pages in length, with most fitting on a single page. It’s about 80 pages of beautifully composed poetry.

I’d recommend this book for all poetry readers.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetry for the dedicated poetry reader - for a casual look in, Seamus Heaney is a tough challenge. His language, his treasure chest of unfamiliar words, the intensity of the focus on one emotion or snapshot of life, make the poems of District and Circle little mysteries. I found myself enjoying the puzzle of picturing what the words imagined and, often, coming away with not much at all. Curiously, perhaps a reflexion of my own comfort and familiarity with prose, the middle piece written in paragraph style were much easier to grasp. Heaney's complexity lies not just in his use of language but in the style and structure of these densely packed poems.

The collection as a whole feels like a contradiction of nature and machinery. They are old photographs of wild places tamed by human eyes and interpretatons. Many of them deal with memories of human relationships with land and nature, with working in and with the land, whether it's the contemplation of fruit trees or a march down country lanes. His descriptions, whether visual or sensual, are touched (sometimes tainted) by a metallic, mechanic feel. The most vivid (perhaps aided by my own visual memories) is the tiny, densely packed poem about the glaciers of Hofn in Iceland, simultaneously natural and almost robotic. 4

[Jean Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll be the first to admit that I struggle with poetry. So often its themes and imagery run amok beyond my understanding. In other words, I don't like it because I don't "get it."

If you are one who struggles with poetry, then please, please read Seamus Heaney. Go ahead, start with District and Circle. It's less than 100 pages. And you know a lot of those pages have white space.

Don't force yourself to hunt for themes or hidden metaphors. Don't wrack your brain to "get it." If one poem doesn't open itself, another will. "Midnight Anvil" has names for people you may not know, you may not get what Heaney's asking in "Wordsworth's Skates," but you'll find yourself walking with the man at "Quitting Time," exploring "The Aerodrome," losing yourself in the beauty of "Rilke: The Apple Orchard." You will see where Heaney takes you. What you feel, what you think? All your own. And I promise you'll be all the better for it.

"If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance."
-Seamus Heaney, "The Aerodrome"

[Owen Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection seemed at first a little sparse and disparate in theme, and in terms of language I felt in the early poems that Heaney was running over a lot of the same territory he covered in the 70s. However, as it progressed into its second "movement" (if that's the right word), in every poem from the new "Tollund Man" onward, District and Circle attacked fresh and new thematic terrain, and in terms of versification went quite far afield of much of Heaney's canon. "In a Loaning" was a four-line poem that almost channeled Wallace Stevens in its sphinx-like obliqueness and rambunctious alliteration. "To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff" reminded me of Harrison's "A Kumquat for John Keats" by amusingly equating Neruda and crab-apples. In the event, earlier poems in the collection made more sense in light of images and ideas pursued more trenchantly in the latter half. One to read and reread in search of yet-unfound "vents of brightness".

[Grady Ormsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Edgeware Road Station on the London Underground marks the convergence of the Circle Line with the District Line. It is also the sight of the July, 2005, terrorist bombings. In District and Circle by Seamus Heaney there is a convergence of many circles, youth to old-age, rural to urban, mechanical to electronic, fleeting to eternal, concrete to abstract, familiar to distant. In a strong lyric voice Heaney presents a grounded realism that keeps the images from being mere abstractions. In his Nobel lecture, Heaney commended the achievement of W.B. Yeats, whose “work does what the necessary poetry does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.” Heaney has certainly achieved the same in his work.

[Dave Maddock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modern poetry is a hard and unforgiving art. Eschewing rhyme, meter, and well-worn structure puts the focus so much more on other aspects of poetic diction such as metaphor, motif, evocative mood, or word choice. When one of those strikes you in the face, it can be really something but when those don't work (in both the objective and subjective sense), it can be really dissatisfying.

This collection had a few gems (for example, Helmet, The Tollund Man in Springtime, or The Blackbird of Glanmore), but it didn't quite live up to the quality of the earlier collection I read, Field Work. When Heaney succeeds for me it is often when he is evoking the mythic and early historic past of his homeland and mixing it with the modern experience.

[Hilary "Fox" · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seamus Heaney is a poet of the present moment and observation. Reading his work is like falling into his memory, experiencing the world at once through a gaze both attentive and mythic. The world, for him, was tinged in something magical while at the same moment so very much there. Here are the calloused hands, the bite of cold as you breathe in, the sweat of the brow and the dirt as your toes sink into it.

He is a rare breed, and somewhere between the organic word and the translations you find yourself occupying the liminal space he knew all too well. He is missed, but we're all the more blessed for his having trod the earth with us a while.

[BrianC75 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rare book, to be savoured.
I really enjoyed the variety of poems in this book - he explores the human condition beautifully in poems about modern urban life and his rural upbringing.
Superb laying out of words and so many ‘killer’ lines and titles.
Read ‘The Lift’ - so typical of Heaney - an Irish woman’s life and death and funeral wonderfully laid out.
One verse - ‘
‘A lifetime, then a death time: reticence
Keeping us together when together,
All declaration deemed outspokenness.’

‘The Helmet’ and ‘Midnight Anvil’. Read them.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its a challenge to read anything by Seamus right now and I am unsure when it will be easy, his death seems to be something I don't wish to acknowledge or believe to be true. I will mark this as read right now but I haven't read it all. Most likely all of my library of his works will for now remain unopened for awhile longer because I am in denial! Seamus who will be our poet now?

[Lo (kipepeo) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not an easy read but my goodness the language is so incredibly beautiful! I feel like I need to read this a thousand times to scrape as much meaning from it as I possibly can.

**4 stars**

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the other Heaney collection I read better. However, the found prose collection is pretty good as is the poem dedicated to Ted Hughes

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highlights: Anahorish 1944, Anything Can Happen, The Lift, Höfn, A Hagging Match, Home Help, The Birch Grove

[Kirsten Kinnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

All gorgeous but my favorites are: The Aerodrome, The Tollund Man in Springtime, Rilke: The Apple Orchard, and Quitting Time.

[Evan Schwarz]

I picked this book up at a bookstore in Dublin and then accidentally went to a restaurant the author used to go around the corner. Being in Ireland was fun.

I really liked how a lot of these poems captured the environment—and I don’t mean that in like the nature sense, I mean that in the sense of the world around the speaker—from train lines to back trails, I feel such a keen sense of place and place in time.

There were also a great deal of poems that focused on people in Heaney’s life and those were great too I think because I didn’t need to know these people to understand the emotional resonance of their important and impact of Heaney.

Some things I noted in the poems themselves is Heaney’s use of hyphenates to join words and concepts together. I thought it was so fun and ingenious to tie together ideas like that into these little compounds. Towards the end of the book I noticed the repetition of words more. I think that might be harder to explain but I think it’s always interesting how repetition creates variation through new context and placement. And then like overall I think sequencing of the pieces was really cool, it had this feeling of moving through space and time through threaded ideas that I really enjoyed. It made it feel more cohesive than just a collection of work.

Also there was a mix of poetry, prose, and translated works that I really liked.

Some poems that stood out to me:
A Shiver
Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road
Found Prose
Nonce Words
In Iowa
Moyulla
The Birch Grove
The Blackbird of Glanmore

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every time I finish a poetry collection I find myself struggling to express my opinions about it in a way that isn't a variation on 'I don't know a lot about poetry, but I know what I like.' I seem to be without the tools to describe the experience of what I've read.

I'm not armed with the academic language needed to talk about structures, but I do know that even if I don't understand the fullest meaning of what I've read I am hypnotised by language. By its rhythms and its sounds. My favourite poets, to rip a line from 'Poet to Blacksmith' from this collection take me into a place where I lose myself in words: "And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell."

For this reason Seamus Heaney has become one of my favourite poets. This stands ever since I read 'Digging' in English O-Level back a time I have almost lost in the mist of my brain - the late 1980s. I probably didn't read another Seamus Heaney poem until thirty years later, but 'Digging' was always there.

This collection, published in 2006, seems to be one of memory. Of roads once walked down. Of places once visited. Of plants and permeance. Of iron and wood. Of real things made by real people. And things lost - to time, to death, to change.

As I said I don't know how to explain all this, but I liked it. I liked it a lot.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘And lines I once translated / Come back’. Heaney translates poems from Horace to Rilke into the new ‘autumn morning’ of the 21st century, turning up the phrase: ‘Anything can happen, the tallest towers / Be overturned’. In ‘Poet to Blacksmith’ the act of translation speaks to the ‘Séamus’ of both parties and multiple centuries. But he also returns: to places and poems, ‘Anahorish’ or ‘Glanmore’, and a Wordsworthian sense of where the two intertwine.

[iina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always find poetry near impossible to review, so my rating is pretty much based on just gut feeling. Quite lovely for an Airbnb bookshelf find, but I would’ve needed something to be different to be fully immersed in these poems.