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District and Circle
 
 
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District and Circle (Paperback)

by Seamus Heaney (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 80 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber; New edition edition (5 Oct 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571230970
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571230976
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 0.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 23,073 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description
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 twentieth-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. 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.

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District and Circle
76% buy the item featured on this page:
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars IT IS A PLEASURE......, 26 Jan 2007
By Val De Beer "Val De Beer" - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: District and Circle (Hardcover)
It is a pleasure, albeit a humbling experience, to review this collection of poems written by Seamus Heaney at the height of his poetic genius.
Since it arrived from Amazon, news reached me of the fact that he has won the prestigious T S Eliot Prize For Poetry, and it is anot surprising to anyone to read this.

Seamus Heaney has always had praise for his family and for the farming community of County Derry in Northern Ireland where he grew up. The soft rhythms of the countryside are heard in his early poems, but in 'District and Circle'where 'turnip heads were let fall and fed / to the juiced-up inner blades'....'as it dropped its raw sliced mess,/ bucketful by glistering bucketful'the idyllic country life is seen in all its horror as well as its beauty.

'The first blow that could make air of a wall,/......The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle'is very different from the actions in 'Digging'- one of his early poems.

There are a number of prose poems as well which have an intensity and glory of their own, as well as the sequence 'The Tollund Man in Springtime.' Coming later in Heaney's life, these poems embody the strength and power of his writing, and his superb control of the medium.
The eponymous poem 'District and Circle' is one of my personal best in this book, portraying the tension and stress to be found in the London Underground, with its moments of awareness of the numbers who are travelling with you in the eternal journey through life.It is a brilliantly structured poem, with resonances of his childhood in the memory of his father as he sees his own face reflected in the glass.
The more one reads that particular poem, the more one realises what a consummately polished piece of work it is,and how fortunate we are to be reading such a brilliant poem.

Another poem which I loved was the one called 'Stern - In Memory of Ted Hughes' which begins 'And what was it like,' I asked him / 'Meeting Eliot' and the brilliant reply 'When he looked at you'/ He said, 'it was like standing on a quay/Watching the prow of the Queen Mary / Come towards you, very slowly.'/
'Now it seems I'm standing on a pierhead watching him'....

We are watching Seamus Heaney making great strides over the world of poetry, a man totally in command of his medium, whose words bow to him.

It is an unforgettable book and it is difficult to say how great an effect it has on one to be in the presence of poetic genius.



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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars eliot's scholar, 20 Jan 2007
this is an innovative display of language from cover to cover; investing the reader's attention in areas we would usually overlook.

this collection has recently been described as 'exhilarating' by judges which awarded the t. s. eliot award 2006 to it, which celebrates the pinnacle of poetry. dark and mysterious, yet accessible and relevant; this book is essential.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but not Great, 8 Dec 2007
By Herman Norford "Keen Reader" (Birmingham, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Seamus Heaney's first collection of poems, "Death of a Naturalist", was published 41 years ago. "District and Circle" is Heaney's 12th volume of poems. It is the first collection of poems by Heaney that I have read. This obviously makes me very new to Heaney's work. Acknowledged as one of the leading poets writing in English, I approached Heaney's District and Circle with some awe.

The of poems in this collection were published in other outlets before being brought together as "District and Circle". What holds them together and give them a sense of cohesiveness is Heaney's reflections and observations of ordinary things and activities that run throughout the book. In "The Aerodrome" Heaney reflects upon a specific place and the way it changes over time. In this poem Heaney's tone and attitude is one of concern and love for this place. There is a revealing line that says: "if self is a location, so is love". Take another example, the title poem, District and Circle. In this poem the ordinary activity of an under ground journey is presented in a refreshing manner that makes one pause for thought about the hustle and bustle of daily life.

These poems in the main appear to be very personal. They display autobiographical vignettes of Heaney's experiences. There are references to religion in the three poems under the heading "Out of this World", there is the keen observation of a mowing machine in the "The Iowa Snow", and there is the mischievous playful youth being surprised by nature in the poem "On the Spot". I marvelled at Heaney's experiences but found it difficult to empathized with him.

If there is a particular form that stands out in this collection, it is the sonnet-like poems. I say sonnet-line because although these poems have the required 14 lines they do not have any rhyming patterns. The sonnet props up throughout the book and it is here in particular that I think Heaney is at his best. He uses the sonnet to spring surprises upon us - see "The Nod", or sometimes to pin un down in the mundane everyday things and activities of life - see "A Clip".

However, these were not poems that reached out and engaged me emotionally. Instead, I was left with the impression of a master conducting an intellectual exercise and in full technical control of his material. Perhaps the best example of this is in two connected poems - "Poet to Blacksmith" and "Midnight Anvil". In these two poems one could hear the tone of the speaker's voice and grasp a sense of the rhythm of normal natural chatter. However, I felt shut out from what appears to be the setting of rural life.

The poems in this collection appear to me to be very insular. They lack universal appeal. Nonethess, in reading the collection, I marvelled at what appeared to be Heaney's attempt to forge a new language to present his subject matter - for example, the poems are littered with new compound words. I found the collection technically sound but in terms of subject matters addressed it lacked significance so for this reason I can only give it three stars.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A truly rich collection of poems
District and Circle is a great collection of poems and one of Seamus Heaney's best. These are lovely poems that celebrate and do justice to what is real and of importance in the... Read more
Published on 23 Jan 2007 by peter

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