District and Circle Read online

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  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. Scenes from a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that “Anything can happen,” and other images from the dangerous present—a fireman’s helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier—are fraught with this same anxiety.

  But the volume, which includes some “found prose” and a number of translations, offers resistance as Heaney 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 that do “the rounds of the district”—its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts—threats to the planet are intuited in the local place, yet a lyric force prevails. With more relish and conviction than ever, Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

  ALSO BY SEAMUS HEANEY

  POETRY

  Death of a Naturalist

  Door into the Dark

  Wintering Out

  North

  Field Work

  Poems 1965–1975

  Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish

  Station Island

  The Haw Lantern

  Selected Poems 1966–1987

  Seeing Things

  Sweeney’s Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese)

  The Spirit Level

  Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996

  Beowulf

  Diary of One Who Vanished

  Electric Light

  CRITICISM

  Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978

  The Government of the Tongue

  The Redress of Poetry

  Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001

  PLAYS

  The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes

  The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  District and Circle. Copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney.

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX 19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  e-ISBN 978-1-4668-5549-6

  First eBook Edition: September 2013

  FOR ANN SADDLEMYER

  Call her Augusta

  Because we arrived in August, and from now on

  This month’s baled hay and blackberries and combines

  Will spell Augusta’s bounty.

  CONTENTS

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  The Turnip-Snedder

  A Shiver

  Polish Sleepers

  Anahorish 1944

  To Mick Joyce in Heaven

  The Aerodrome

  Anything Can Happen

  Helmet

  Out of Shot

  Rilke: After the Fire

  District and Circle

  To George Seferis in the Underworld

  Wordsworth’s Skates

  The Harrow-Pin

  Poet to Blacksmith

  Midnight Anvil

  Súgán

  Senior Infants

  1. The Sally Rod

  2. A Chow

  3. One Christmas Day in the Morning

  The Nod

  A Clip

  Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road

  Found Prose

  1. The Lagans Road

  2. Tall Dames

  3. Boarders

  The Lift

  Nonce Words

  Stern

  Out of This World

  1. “Like everybody else …”

  2. Brancardier

  3. Saw Music

  In Iowa

  Höfn

  On the Spot

  The Tollund Man in Springtime

  Moyulla

  Planting the Alder

  Tate’s Avenue

  A Hagging Match

  Fiddleheads

  To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff

  Home Help

  1. Helping Sarah

  2. Chairing Mary

  Rilke: The Apple Orchard

  Quitting Time

  Home Fires

  1. A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth

  2. A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden

  The Birch Grove

  Cavafy: “The rest I’ll speak of to the ones below in Hades”

  In a Loaning

  The Blackbird of Glanmore

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  These poems first appeared, many in slightly different versions, in Agenda, Agni, Harvard Review, Irish Pages, Metre, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Pretext II, The Guardian, Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, Scintilla, London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Salmagundi, Tatler, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Yellow Nib, Village, Waxwing Poems.

  A number of the poems also appeared in A Shiver (Clutag, 2005). “Anything Can Happen,” along with a short essay and several translations, was included in a publication with that same title (Amnesty/Town House, 2004). “Tall Dames” is adapted from “A Gate Left Open,” a programme note for the Dublin performance of Janáček’s “Diary of One Who Vanished” (Gaiety Theatre, 14–16 October 1999); “Saw Music” appeared in The Door Stands Open (Irish Writers’ Centre, 2005). “On the Spot” was commissioned by Maurice Riordan and John Burnside for their anthology, Wild Reckoning (Picador, 2004).

  The lines quoted in “To George Seferis in the Underworld” are from his poem “On Aspalathoi,” translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Complete Poems, Princeton University Press, 1995); the epigraph is from Roderick Beaton’s George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel (Yale University Press, 2003).

  “The soul exceeds its circumstances” (p. 56) is quoted from Leon Wieseltier’s appreciation of Czeslaw Milosz, The New York Times Book Review, 12 September 2004. “B-Men” (p. 34) were the auxiliary B-Special Force of the former Royal Ulster Constabulary.

  THE TURNIP-SNEDDER

  For Hughie O’Donoghue

  In an age of bare hands

  and cast iron,

  the clamp-on meat-mincer,

  the double flywheeled water-pump,

  it dug its heels in among wooden tubs

  and troughs of slops,

  hotter than body heat

  in summertime, cold in winter

  as winter’s body armour,

  a barrel-chested breast-plate

  standing guard

  on four braced greaves.

  “This is the way that God sees life,”

  it said, “from seedling-braird to snedder,’

  as the handle turned

  and turnip-heads were let fall and fed

  to the juiced-up inner blades,

  “This is the turnip-cycle,”

  as it dropped its raw sliced mess,

  bucketful by glistering bucketful.

  A SHIVER

  The way you had to stand to swing the sledge,

  Your two knees locked, your lower back shock-fast

  As shields in a testudo, spine and waist

  A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage;

  The way its iron head pl
anted the sledge

  Unyieldingly as a club-footed last;

  The way you had to heft and then half-rest

  Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage

  About to be let fly: does it do you good

  To have known it in your bones, directable,

  Withholdable at will,

  A first blow that could make air of a wall,

  A last one so unanswerably landed

  The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?

  POLISH SLEEPERS

  Once they’d been block-built criss-cross and four-squared

  We lived with them and breathed pure creosote

  Until they were laid and landscaped in a kerb,

  A moulded verge, half-skirting, half-stockade,

  Soon fringed with hardy ground-cover and grass.

  But as that bulwark bleached in sun and rain

  And the washed gravel pathway showed no stain,

  Under its parched riverbed

  Flinch and crunch I imagined tarry pus

  Accruing, bearing forward to the garden

  Wafts of what conspired when I’d lie

  Listening for the goods from Castledawson …

  Each languid, clanking waggon,

  And afterwards, rust, thistles, silence, sky.

  ANAHORISH 1944

  “We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.

  A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood

  Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road

  They would have heard the squealing,

  Then heard it stop and had a view of us

  In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.

  Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.

  Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.

  Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,

  Hosting for Normandy.

  Not that we knew then

  Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters

  As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.”

  TO MICK JOYCE IN HEAVEN

  1.

  Kit-bag to tool-bag,

  Warshirt to workshirt—

  Out of your element

  Among farmer in-laws,

  The way you tied sheaves

  The talk of the country,

  But out on your own

  When skylined on scaffolds—

  A demobbed Achilles

  Who was never a killer,

  The strongest instead

  Of the world’s stretcher-bearers,

  Turning your hand

  To the bricklaying trade.

  2.

  Prince of the sandpiles,

  Hod-hoplite commander

  Watching the wall,

  Plumbing and pointing

  From pegged-out foundation

  To first course to cornice,

  Keeping an eye

  On the eye in the level

  Before the cement set:

  Medical orderly,

  Bedpanner, bandager

  Transferred to the home front,

  Rising and shining

  In brass-buttoned drab.

  3.

  You spoke of “the forces,”

  Had served in the desert,

  Been strafed and been saved

  By courses of blankets

  Fresh-folded and piled

  Like bales on a field.

  No sandbags that time.

  A softness preserved you.

  You spoke of sex also,

  Talked man to man,

  Took me for granted:

  The English, you said,

  Would do it on Sundays

  Upstairs, in the daytime.

  4.

  The weight of the trowel,

  That’s what surprised me.

  You’d lift its lozenge-shaped

  Blade in the air

  To sever a brick

  In a flash, and then twirl it

  Fondly and lightly.

  But whenever you sent me

  To wash it and dry it

  And you had your smoke,

  Its iron was heavy,

  Its sloped-angle handle

  So thick-spanned and daunting

  I needed two hands.

  5.

  “To Mick Joyce in Heaven”—

  The title just came to me,

  Mick, and I started

  If not quite from nowhere,

  Then somewhere far off:

  A bedroom, bright morning,

  A man and a woman,

  Their backs to the bedhead

  And me at the foot.

  It was your first leave,

  A stranger arrived

  In a house with no upstairs,

  But heaven enough

  To be going on with.

  THE AERODROME

  First it went back to grass, then after that

  To warehouses and brickfields (designated

  The Creagh Meadows Industrial Estate),

  Its wartime grey control tower rebuilt and glazed

  Into a hard-edged CEO style villa:

  Toome Aerodrome had turned to local history.

  Hangars, runways, bomb stores, Nissen huts,

  The perimeter barbed wire, forgotten and gone.

  But not a smell of daisies and hot tar

  On a newly surfaced cart road, Easter Monday,

  1944. And not, two miles away that afternoon,

  The annual bright booths of the fair at Toome,

  All the brighter for having been denied.

  No catchpenny stalls for us, no

  Awnings, bonnets, or beribboned gauds:

  Wherever the world was, we were somewhere else,

  Had been and would be. Sparrows might fall,

  B-26 Marauders not return, but the sky above

  That land usurped by a compulsory order

  Watched and waited—like me and her that day

  Watching and waiting by the perimeter.

  A fear crossed over then like the fly-by-night

  And sun-repellent wing that flies by day

  Invisibly above: would she rise and go

  With the pilot calling from his Thunderbolt?

  But for her part, in response, only the slightest

  Back-stiffening and standing of her ground

  As her hand reached down and tightened around mine.

  If self is a location, so is love:

  Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,

  Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,

  Here and there and now and then, a stance.

  ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

  after Horace, Odes, I, 34

  Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter

  Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head

  Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now

  He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

  Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth

  And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,

  The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.

  Anything can happen, the tallest towers

  Be overturned, those in high places daunted,

  Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune

  Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,

  Setting it down bleeding on the next.

  Ground gives. The heaven’s weight

  Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.

  Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.

  Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

  HELMET

  Bobby Breen’s. His Boston fireman’s gift

  With BREEN in scarlet letters on its spread

  Fantailing brim,

  Tinctures of sweat and hair oil

  In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs

  Beneath the crown—

  Or better say the crest, for crest it is—

  Leather-trimmed, steel-r
idged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,

  Tipped with a little bud of beaten copper …

  Bobby Breen’s badged helmet’s on my shelf

  These twenty years, “the headgear

  Of the tribe,” as O’Grady called it

  In right heroic mood that afternoon

  When the fireman-poet presented it to me

  As “the visiting fireman”—

  As if I were up to it, as if I had

  Served time under it, his fire-thane’s shield,

  His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass

  And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof

  Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there

  Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.

  OUT OF SHOT

  November morning sunshine on my back

  This bell-clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut-firm

  On the unseasonably warm

  Top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock,

  Catching gleams of the distant Viking vik

  Of Wicklow Bay; thinking scriptorium,

  Norse raids, night-dreads, and that “fierce raiders” poem

  About storm on the Irish Sea—so no attack

  In the small hours or next morning; thinking shock

  Out of the blue or blackout, the staggered walk

  Of a donkey on the TV news last night—

  Loosed from a cart that had loosed five mortar shells

  In the bazaar district, wandering out of shot

  Lost to its owner, lost for its sunlit hills.

  RILKE: AFTER THE FIRE

  Early autumn morning hesitated,

  Shying at newness, an emptiness behind

  Scorched linden trees still crowding in around

  The moorland house, now just one more wallstead

  Where youngsters gathered up from god knows where

  Hunted and yelled and ran wild in a pack.

  Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,

  The son of the place, and with a long forked stick

  Dragged an out-of-shape old can or kettle

  From under hot, half burnt away house-beams;

  And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,

  Turned to the others present, at great pains

  To make them realize what had stood so.