District and Circle


District and Circle is a poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was published in 2006 and won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. The collection also won the Irish Times "Poetry Now Award".
Reporting on the Eliot Prize, the BBC commented in 2007, "The award is yet more confirmation, as if it was needed, of Heaney's reputation as, arguably, the English language's greatest living bard, whom author Malcolm Bradbury once described as 'the poet of poets'." In 2013, Heaney's volumes made up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in Britain.
The poet dedicated District and Circle to the Canadian professor of Irish Studies Ann Saddlemyer. Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.

Contents

  1. The Turnip-Snedder
  2. Shiver
  3. Polish Sleepers
  4. Anahorish 1944
  5. To Mick Joyce in Heaven
  6. The Aerodrome
  7. Anything Can Happen
  8. Helmet
  9. Out of Shot
  10. Rilke: After the Fire
  11. District and Circle
  12. To George Seferis in the Underworld
  13. Wordsworth’s Skates
  14. The Harrow-Pin
  15. Poet to Blacksmith
  16. Midnight Anvil
  17. Súgán
  18. Senior Infants 1. The Sally Rod
  19. Senior Infants 2. A Chow
  20. Senior Infants 3. One Christmas Day in the Morning
  21. The Nod
  22. A Clip
  23. Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road
  24. Found Prose 1. The Lagans Road
  25. Found Prose 2. Tall Dames
  26. Found Prose 3. Boarders
  27. The Lift
  28. Nonce Words
  29. Stern
  30. Out of this World 1. 'Like Everybody Else...'
  31. Out of this World 2. Brancardier
  32. Out of this World 3. Saw Music
  33. In Iowa
  34. Höfn
  35. On the Spot
  36. Tollund Man in Springtime
  37. Moyulla
  38. Planting the Alder
  39. Tate’s Avenue
  40. A Hagging Match
  41. Fiddleheads
  42. To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff
  43. Home Help 1. Helping Sarah
  44. Home Help 2. Chairing Mary
  45. Rilke: The Apple Orchard
  46. Quitting Time
  47. Home Fires 1. A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth
  48. Home Fires 2. A Stove Lid for W.H. Auden
  49. The Birch Gove
  50. Cavafy: 'The Rest I’ll Speak of to the Ones Below in Hades’
  51. In a Loaning
  52. The Blackbird of Glanmore

    Critical reception

The poetry in District and Circle has been widely and positively reviewed by the critics. In the Observer Review Andrew Motion wrote, "Due in large part to the richness of his language, and also to the undiminished freshness of his response to time-honoured things, its consolidations have the feel of celebrations. The book does not merely dig in, but digs deep." The poet and critic Stephanie Burt also praised the book, writing that "anyone who isn’t impressed isn’t listening." Brad Leithauser, in The New York Times, praised Heaney for "saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say".
The critic Peter McDonald said "The book contains marvellous prose-poems on the peopled landscapes of his schooldays, along with sonnets - seemingly effortless in their sheer fluency, but memorably tough and intent". Stephen Knight wrote that District and Circle was not "as immediate as his earlier work," but he still considered the book to be successful on its own terms, characterizing it as "a late flowering."