Seamus Heaney, laureate-in-exile and the unchallenged patriarch of living English-language poets, returns to us now–with a new volume of poems–almost unchanged after more than forty years in print.
The archetypes of Heaney’s poetry have always been farming implements. The spades and the pitchforks course with significance–yet they signify nothing as trite as “man’s relationship with land”, but are instead symbols of all things well-wrought and fit for the purpose. This is Heaney’s poetic manifesto. It is not a manifesto that promises close attention to meaning, to issues, to politics, to history, to nature; although, surely, all of these feature incidentally. It is a manifesto of method which promises only skilled craftsmanship. For the tightest, neatest, most robust and finely-tuned poetry, language has, for some time now, bespoken Heaney.
Heaney is on home turf right from the start with “The Turnip-Snedder”, a poem that stands as a sturdy testament to one of his specialist skills: close particularisation. The snedder, an ominous symbol of Hardian agricultural ruthlessness from “the age of bare hands / and cast iron”, is a machine designed to perform a specific task:

as the handle turned
the turnip-heads were let fall and fed

to the juiced-up inner blades,

In monstrous opposition to the snedder is the abandoned mowing machine in “In Iowa”: “snow brimmed its iron seat…and took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.” The mower fallen into disuse and disrepair is a dark and nihilistic image, tantamount, in Heaney’s world, to the most harrowing religious experience.
Heaney admitted in “Digging”, the first poem from his debut collection Death of a Naturalist (1966), that he had “no spade to follow men like them [his ancestors]”; instead, as a talented young wordsmith, he resolved to make his pen the tool of his trade. Heaney’s archetypes of rural labour have always been of vital importance, and, with the passage of time, could not have grown any more important than they were originally. Any progression might be in part marked by the presentation and setting of the farm implements. The young Heaney of “Digging”–in which “the spade sinks into the gravelly ground” outside the window of his room–describes a spade in its rightful domestic context. Thirty years later in “The Pitchfork” (Seeing Things 1991), Heaney’s grandfather, musing on “probes that reached the farthest”, imagines

the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past
Evenly, imperturbably through space,
Its prongs starlit and absolutely soundless -

In its new and unfamiliar environs, Heaney’s pitchfork loses its primary association and mutates into pure symbol. In “Poet to Blacksmith” in the new collection, the spade’s significance is further enhanced as the subject of a historical discourse in which, it is suggested, the notion of a spade was actually conceived. The poem is translated from the instructions of the eighteenth-century Irish poet Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain to Seamus MacGearailt. It is a poem that is so entirely Heaney in every imaginable way that one can only register astonishment that he has not translated it before now. In the instructions, the poet explains to the blacksmith what he expects of his “side-arm to take on the earth”:

No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade,
The thing to have purchase and strain and be fit for the spring,
The shaft to be socketed in dead true and dead straight

Immediately discernable are the strong, buoyant rhythms that Heaney mopped up from Hopkins sprung verse; the Anglo-Saxon alliterations and consonances that permeated Beowulf (1999); and Heaney’s characteristic fascination with the minutiae of manual crafts. The qualifications listed in the poem are, in Heaney’s eyes, applicable also to the construction of a good poem. The last line, “And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell”,–more the relevant criterion of a poem than a spade–seems to be Heaney showing his hand.
Heaney’s penchant for the particular is visible in almost every poem. More often than not, the hyphen plays a substantial role in seeking out the thingness of things: the “club-footed last”, “stropped-beak Fortune”, Bobby Breen’s “leather-trimmed, steel-ridged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn” helmet, the furiously-Hopkins-esque “Bog-bank brown”, “locked-park Sunday Belfast” and, most beautifully perhaps, the “rain-flirt leaves”.
District and Circle is, objectively, a ragbag. If it should happen to be his last collection–unlikely, I think, given Heaney’s apparently bounteous poetic reserves–it would serve very aptly. There is much ground revisited–many loose-ends are tied and crumbs swept from the old table. “The Tollund Man in Springtime”, for example, imagines the icon of Wintering Out (1972) reanimated and alive in the present day, and re-explores the idea of utter dislocation and the impossibility of passing judgement on history–an assurance that must have been running thick in Heaney’s mind when he wrote, to the “Little adulteress”, “I almost love you / but would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence.” (”Punishment”, North 1975). Life in a different time, it suggests, is unlearnable. “The Blackbird of Glanmore”, with which the collection ends, is the long-awaited sequel to “Mid-Term Break” (Death of a Naturalist, 1966), showing that Heaney still dwells, from time to time, on the “haunter-son, lost brother” whose death was recorded so poignantly in the earlier poem.
Much of the collection reads like a series of belated letters to friends and pin-ups, with many of the poems bearing a dedication, or directly addressing famous figures–largely deceased. Most notable among these is a short poem in memory of Ted Hughes, Heaney’s contemporary for so many years, with whom he co-edited various anthologies. “Stern”, an imagistic nugget, seems to owe itself partly to Hughes and his inimitable ability with metaphor. Hughes reportedly compares T. S. Eliot’s (the title is possibly an oblique play on his name) gaze to “the prow of the Queen Mary” moving towards him “very slowly”. In response, Heaney describes Hughes, in his own terms, as, in death, trying to row away, but “Making no real headway.”
The title poem gives a minutely-detailed description travelling on the London Underground, and considers the protocol of giving money to vagrants, which, Heaney admits, often retreats into the “nod”–a completely wordless exchange, but pregnant with mutual understanding.
Carefully weighted, meticulously measured, tried in balance and trim, Heaney’s poetry is always an exercise in precision. His word placement is immaculate, and anyone reading his poems must often find themselves wondering how he manages to crystallize ordinary phrases and sentences and arrange the words in a form in which, it seems, they were always hoping to find themselves. Though broad in his range, Heaney has always had one foot firmly planted in the peat bog near his childhood home in County Londonderry, and this collection is no exception. Seamus Heaney will be 68 in April; but poetry is sedentary occupation, and rarely do poets retire. Judging by the high quality of much of District and Circle, and the sustained momentum of Heaney’s career, there is life in the old bog yet.