District and Circle
by Seamus Heaney
Summary
District and Circle is late Heaney at full strength, the book in which the Nobel laureate, past sixty five, returned to the deep ground of his art and found it not only intact but newly urgent. The title poem rides the London Underground lines Heaney had traveled as a young man in the 1960s, and in the post 2005 city the descent among crowded strangers carries a hum of dread the poem never names directly; that doubleness, the remembered and the menacing sharing one image, runs through the whole collection. The Tollund Man, the bog body who presided over Heaney's poems of the Troubles thirty years earlier, is resurrected here in springtime, walking out into the modern world, the old sacrificial figure blinking at what we have made. Around these returns the book conducts its loving inventory of made things and vanished skills, the turnip snedder, the anvil, the harrow pin, objects rendered with such tactile authority that the poems feel less written than forged; Heaney's first world, the Derry farm, supplies its matter one more time, now explicitly as memory work, salvage against the dark. Andrew Motion wrote that the book's consolidations have "the feel of celebrations", and Brad Leithauser praised him for saying something extraordinary while conveying, line by line, "a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say". District and Circle won the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize, the biggest name the award had yet crowned, and it stands with the finest late collections in the language.
Historical Context & Significance
Heaney was eleven years past the Nobel when District and Circle appeared in 2006, at a commercial and cultural altitude no poet had occupied since, his books at one point accounting for two thirds of living poets' sales in Britain; the Eliot Prize was almost the only major honor he had not held, and the 2006 award completed the set. The collection's undertow of threat drew on the London bombings of 2005, read alongside its Iron Age returns. Heaney suffered his stroke that same year and wrote one more collection, Human Chain, before his death in 2013, when Ireland mourned him as a national loss; District and Circle is the summit of the late work, the collection the tributes quoted beside the early famous ones.