It is forty years since Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published by Faber, and instantly recognised as the arrival of a major new voice. Reading his new book, one is struck by how much of that original vision remains intact: the childhood landscapes, the rural community, the pull of flowing water. But to brand District and Circle as ‘the same old thing’ would be to miss the astonishing fact that the ‘thing’ – the voice – is, in its flexibility and capaciousness, seemingly inexhaustible, capable of dowsing poetry from the stoniest of ground. It is a voice we have come to trust, and, paradoxically, we trust that it will surprise us. Giving his Clark Lecture in Cambridge earlier this year, Heaney quoted the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who died in 2004: ‘Poetry below a certain level of awareness is not interesting.’ It is the acute awareness of District and Circle, its heightened sensitivity to ‘a sixth-sensed threat’ and historical circularity, which now surprises us with an image of our own unstable and suspicious times. 

From the opening poem, there is war in the air: the turnip-snedder, like ‘a barrel-chested breast-plate’, mauls whole turnips into ‘raw sliced mess’. Then, in ‘A Shiver’, by a feat of musical and syntactical momentum, the wielding of a sledgehammer becomes the occasion for an interrogation of power: ‘does it do you good / To have known it in your bones, directable, / Witholdable at will…?’ These could apply to any number of circumstances: Heaney’s images are not directly but intuitively applicable to real-world events, just as ‘Storm on the Island' from Death of a Naturalist spoke sideways of the Cold War (‘Space is a salvo, / We are bombarded by the empty air’). So District and Circle suggests the conflicts of our time but never confines itself to particulars: we see the ‘staggered walk / Of a donkey on the TV news last night’, or the ‘withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs’ of a Boston fireman’s helmet. We note the second-hand, media-filtered nature of these references – Heaney never claims more knowledge than he owns, and indeed being presented with this helmet, ‘The headgear / Of the tribe’, brings an ethical queasiness: ‘As if I were up to it, as if I had / Served time under it’. 

The title poem hits closest to home, with its trip on the Tube paralleling an imaginative journey into Hades, past a beggar-ferryman, then, ‘Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts / Of escalators ascending and descending / To a slight monotonous rocking in the works’, until on the train he sees himself, ‘Reflecting in a window mirror-backed / By blasted weeping rock-walls. / Flicker-lit.’ But a confrontation with death is not necessarily a bad thing. The translation from Horace’s Odes reminds us that, ‘Anything can happen, the tallest towers // Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded.’ It is typical of Heaney’s life-affirming attitude that he should turn the instability of the era back upon itself and remind us that this unexpectedness can work in both directions: that the collapsed towers are not simply the skylines of New York and Baghdad but also, potentially, the structures of power and privilege that gave rise to these disasters, whose days may now be numbered. 

Typical, also, that Heaney should look back to Horace. His awareness is also an awareness of literary tradition, the long line in which he takes his place. District and Circle is full of poems of, to, and from other poets: Rilke, Seferis, Neruda, Wordsworth, Auden, Milosz, to name just a few. This is not perverse academicism: far from it. It is part of Heaney’s ongoing effort, most striking in Station Island, to ‘people’ his poems, to compass within them the conversations that have shaped his own art. The poem in memory of Milosz, ‘Out of this World’, continues a discussion between the two poets about the ongoing hold of Catholicism: its language, its sense of mystery, if not of its articles of faith. This is the hold of the world, the spiritual duty, as before, for affirmation in spite of everything: the ‘untranscendent music of the saw / He might have heard in Vilnius or Warsaw // And would not have renounced, however paltry.’ 

In its refusal to renounce or to compromise the beauty and timelessness of poetry in pursuit of an immediate local effect, District and Circle is itself a rehabilitative experience after the murk and bluff of discourse around the war. Here is powerful confirmation that culture can be central, not expendable; that honest speech can still be made and heard.