District and Circle
Using an Underground journey and shards of memory, the collection returns to the past while measuring the unease of the present.
Work Information
Memory and the present overlap in the sway of the Underground.
District and Circle begins with an Underground ride and turns it into a meditation on the tension between past and present. Concrete landscapes and memory overlap to create a quiet but sustained sense of urgency.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2006-10-05
- Pages
- 96 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.9 x 0.8 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571230976
- ISBN-10
- 0571230970
- Price
- 430 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
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 21st 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 II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the 'heavyweight silence' of cattle out in rain - are coloured 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.
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. His translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI was published posthumously in 2016 to critical acclaim.
Reviews
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Please read this collection
I was so sad to hear of the death of Seamus Heaney, a truly great poet. I bought this to mark the sad occasion as I had neglected to read these poems up til now. I keep them on my bedside table and read and contemplate on one each night. Highly recommended.
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Needs and expectations met!
I am a big fan of Seamus Heaney and the book of his poems i received was exactly as described.
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Five Stars
As described
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Good Journey
I do find Seamus Heaney paints great pictures with his words and even sad topics seem bearable in his hands.
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Five Stars
Has all the qualities we expect even for the unexpected location.
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 14 (2006) ・Winner