District and Circle

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and as many of the other reviewers have already stated it harks back to his earlier pieces "Death of a Naturalist" in particular This is the Heaney that I enjoy most - the image evoking sounds of his words, the ordinariness of the scenes, and for an Irish farmers daughter who now lives in the States the words bring back a ton of memories. In Quitting Time for instance, the phrase "redding up" (clearing up and tidying the farmyard after the day's work) is a phrase I haven't heard in years and boy does it remind me of my Dad. This collection is a gem and just delightful to dip into.

The title poem alone is worth the admission price. A great work, "Tollund Man" and other poems harken back to early Heaney--an elder echo to North, Wintering Out and Door Into the Dark.

It felt as if a piece of smoking Irish peat had been flung in my door when this little paperback arrived in Santa Monica, California. The pages are alive with Ireland, the thoughts and feelings I had forgotten or never knew how to acknowledge. "There was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out." The unseen and untouchable are tangible here. I love it all.

You cannot read these poems without feeling better about the whole universe. He hears an underground piper. His house has no upstairs. He celebrates stretcher bearers, bricklayers. Turns walls into air. He chooses red haws and whins, brogues and rigs, cripples with perseverence and we feel the work as we go along. He watches the pollen sowings tarnish her pools. He's mother nature's strong right hand and eye. God bless him.

I must admit that I expected to be disappointed with this latest effort. Mr. Heaney started his career with some of the best poetry in English since we lost Wallace Stevens. His first collection, "Death of A Naturalist" is unnaturally strong. He arrived a absolute master of metrics and music; this reader still marvels at those early lyrics, often singing them to himself---elegiac, packed with memorable imagery...poems with a very strong sense of the past (which must have been refreshing after "The Pound and Elliot era"...an era that, in my humble estimation, shut more doors than it opened), but which were unique and spoke to the Right Now. Heaney built on this "early candor" in successive volumes, but I have been depressed by his more recent work. It has settled into that super-literate backslapping, in-circle, kissing-their-own-hands academic verse that we are literally drowning in right now. Heaney has always been a learned poet, and to his readers delight--but in his early years he remained apart from the workshop and the lecture hall. With his appointment at various universities, I'm afraid his work has changed. His many poetic friendships I'm sure are enriching, but do we have to read about them? I wish more poets would have the courage of, say, a W.S. Merwin, contributing translations, keeping the bar high, but nevertheless standing apart from "the scene". Well, digression aside, Mr.Heany's new work is superb. The lyrics are grounded--in metaphors of work, of change, of loss. The lyrics are varied; so is the music--and in verbal music, Heaney has no peer. For years, the late James Merril vied with him for that laurel crown--now Heaney stands alone, and here he makes a sound that is touching, vivid, often incantatory, full of squelch and belch. Here we have a poet at blossoming into a late wonder.