District and Circle

[a: Seamus Heaney|29574|Seamus Heaney|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1200407647p2/29574.jpg] 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.

When I first read Seamus Heaney's poetry I was blown away. His artful use of dialogue, rhythm, annd description are the perfect tools for crafitng poetry. Yet, I felt that this collection fell short of my expectations. His telltale skills are still present, but I felt that the scope of the subject of this collection was far too broad. He focuses on "normal" life in Ireland, but he stretches it all the way from the legendary Tollund Man (a historical subject) to modern city infrastructures. The dichotomy of the two subjects could easily have complimented eachother artistically, but I don't think Heaney quite managed to bridge that gap. The closest he got to bridging the past and the present were the poems to and about other Irish poets show more like Auden and Hughes, and that's really just name dropping, even if he is connected to them in the Irish poetic traditions. show less

This is a slim volume of poetry, although my favorite was the few pages in the middle of what the author called Found Prose; beautiful short descriptions. Most of the poetry was about the author's rural Irish childhood, but other poems wanders into the American Midwest or to the London Underground. Lushly descriptive, they evoke time and place more completely than anything I've read, or even a sepia-toned photograph. In Saw Music Heaney describes a busker in a store doorway:

Flop-wobble grace note or high banshee whine.
Rain spat upon his threadbare gabardine,
Into his cap where the occasional tossed coin
Basked on damp lining, the raindrops glittering

I am writing a review of this book, because the title poem, "District and Circle" is a great poem. This is one of the best evocations I have read of what it feels to be in the undergound, this alternate world of mostly moving humanity. But Heaney starts off with one of the non-moving denizens, a player of a tin-whistle. Then he drives forth into the almost cacaphonous platforms and trains. At last, he comes to a more silent area where he thinks of father in a vaguely similar 'flicker-lit' world.

Turns out what I enjoy in poetry is Sensuality in its literal and erotic sense. I revel in the vibrato of a quiver, the cold glow, the slow seep. Like the title sequence of Dexter.

My favourite is Tate's Avenue.

Cover note: I really like the cover with the bird enclosed by a thick foliage, but then I find that it's only a section of a portrait of Heaney which I'm less a fan of.

I found the last third of this collection to be the best. The first third I didn't much care for but I may have just not been in the right mood for them.