District and Circle

Summary

Taking the London Underground as a way into the underworld—both Virgilian and literal—this collection moves between the modern city and the rural Irish landscapes of Heaney's childhood, using the tube as a figure for the layered strata of history, memory, and the dead. Heaney's mature style here is wonderfully supple, balancing formal gravity with a quality of present-tense attention that keeps even elegiac poems alive. Remarkably, it was his only T. S. Eliot Prize win.