Stephen Burt reviews District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

It’s tempting to say that a poet of Seamus Heaney’s powers, with his reputation, at this stage of his career, can do anything he wants to do. But no poet can do everything he, or she, wants to do: poets receive only what the Muse can broadcast. For a while, during the 1990s, Seamus Heaney’s Muse broadcast a sort of 24-hour Epiphany Channel: there were strong pages, and plenty of strong phrases, in Seeing Things, in The Spirit Level, but there were also gleams and glows and airy auroras all over, a sometimes too-easy self-confidence in transcendence, available in any subject at all. By comparison, Heaney’s new book seems down-to-earth in every sense—it’s less ambitious, less unified, quieter, with more, and smaller-scale, subjects and scenes. If you don’t mind (and I don’t) its insistently humble nostalgia, it could strike you as his most appealing work in a while.

Much of the book takes up childhood memories: the butcher shop, the barber, primary school friends, farm implements. Some of the memories arrive not in verse but in pages of attractive prose. A poem addressed to Auden remembers how, in youth, Heaney had “loved a lifter made of stainless steel,/ The way its stub claw found its clink-fast hold.” The lyricism is serious, as is the lyricism about turnip-snedders, sledge-hammers, horse-collars, garden equipment, and other domestic or agricultural bric-a-brac. One of Heaney’s least noticed projects — newly evident here — has been to find ways to make memories of apparent inconsequence (especially, but not only, pleasant ones) aesthetically interesting; he does so, often, through poems that juxtapose the thing-as-it-seemed-then to its meaning now. So many poems here (some in prose) remember weightless, apparently insignificant bits of childhood sights, or pursue stray mnemonic associations: “Fiddlehead ferns are a delicacy where? Japan? Estonia? Ireland long ago?”

Other memories carry more serious burdens. In “Anahorish 1944,” the speaker (quote marks enclose the whole poem) remembers American soldiers stationed in Ireland but bound for Normandy, “Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching." The tableau reverses, with elegant irony, the binary of innocence and experience, or innocence and guilt, which we might expect: “We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived,” while the soldiers were “standing there like youngsters/ As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.” If the Heaney of North implied that guilt lay everywhere, the Heaney of District and Circle says that innocence and helplessness are everywhere too. The current "war on terror" informs a smart translation from Horace and a sketch about “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 sight,” away from the conflict, like Balaam's ass in reverse.

When District and Circle does not consider Heaney's childhood, it often reconsiders his earlier poems. “Moyulla” returns to the dinnseanchas genre (poems about Irish place names) in which Heaney worked decades ago. “The Blackbird of Glanmore” appears to rewrite “Mid-Term Break”. Another sonnet sequence, “The Tollund Man in Springtime”, resurrects that celebrated Bog Person for (at least) a third time. Where “The Haw Lantern” imagined an inner Diogenes testing and failing each reader, and the celebrated sequence "Station Island" held encounters with serial ghosts, the first sonnet in the new volume’s title sequence has a London busker and a poet-commuter“eye” each other, recognise the impossibility of mutual judgment, and simply “nod.” Here Heaney seems altogether more forgiving — of himself and of us — than he once was. Of course, being Heaney, he writes further sonnets full of second thoughts about his second thoughts: “Had I betrayed or not, myself or him?/ Always new to me, always familiar/ This unrepentant, now repentant turn.” The busker (to whom he almost gives, but does not give, a coin) has become a Tube-stop Orpheus, the musical spirit in Heaney’s work, to whom the citizenly, responsible poet feels he ought to pay more heed.…or is it vice versa? About the responsibilities of a poet (to himself, to his art, to community, to the language), Heaney seems content to keep himself guessing: not the guesses, but the second-guesses, produce his most characteristic poems.

They do not do so unaided. Equally Heaneyesque, equally individual, are the unparalleled melodic gifts, the unusually broad vocabulary and singing pentameters which can make musical any subject at all. Here is the poet simply boarding a Tube train:

Stepping on to it across the gap,
On to the carriage metal, I reached to grab
The stubby black roof-wort and take my stand.
 From planted ball of heel to heel of hand
A sweet traction and heavy down-slump stayed me.

Here is his first, childhood, taste of chewing tobacco: “The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to/ At the burning-out of a neighbour, I want to lick/ Bran from a bucket, grit off the coping-stone.” (They are lines good enough for another poet to build an entire lyric around them; Heaney simply moves on.) Here is a stable: “Horses’ collars lined with sweat-veined ticking,/ Old cobwebbed reins and hames and eye-patched winkers,/ The tackle of the mighty, simple dead."

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.

 

District and Circle (Faber), £12.99, 80 pp

 

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.