The Poet’s poet

A new book by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. This is from the publisher’s site:

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 twenty-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 colored 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.

Read about it here in The New York Times Book Revew. And here from Tower Poetry. An excerpt of the review:

Heaney seems to feel that whatever else poetry could or should do, its first task is to make eloquent the five senses in the remembered world: his own verse makes the best case for that task. We might say of these low-key, often beautiful poems, and of the people and objects they present, what Heaney says (in one of his prose pages) about the wandering people he saw in his childhood, then called “gypsies,” now called travellers: “Even though you encountered them in broad daylight, going about their usual business, there was always a feeling they were coming towards you out of storytime.” No one will mistake “District and Circle” for “Station Island,” nor District and Circle for Field Work; but anyone who isn’t impressed isn’t listening.

Check out this link to read two poems from his latest (from Poetry Daily).

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet