WILLIAM WOOTTEN
Seamus Heaney
DISTRICT AND CIRCLE
80pp. Faber and Faber. £12.99.
0 571 23096 2
There’s no one like Seamus Heaney for taking weight and temperature. As he studies the “way you had to stand to swing the sledge” in “A Shiver”, or records the “Rib roast and shin” as “dead weight in a sling” in “The Nod”, Heaney will note strength, capacity for violence and possible mortality. When he feels a “cold clutch” of eggs, in “On the Spot”, or recalls the “The Turnip-Snedder” “hotter than body heat / in summer time, cold in winter / as winter’s body armour”, he’ll locate mortmain, fever and the chill. So one of the satisfactions of the new collection District and Circle derives from how Heaney’s eyes, less inclined to that faraway look than of late, are so frequently trained on his scales and his thermometer.
In “Anything Can Happen”, a post-9/11 adaptation of Horace (Odes, 1, 34), Heaney adds how “heaven’s weight / Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid”. The poem’s hold on contemporary reference isn’t sure in all respects – while the hijackers of the planes may have believed that they were enacting divine will, few would ascribe the destruction of New York’s “tallest towers” to “Jupiter” – but in his depiction of weight hotly pressured into weightlessness Heaney couples domestic image to world-shaking event and the intimate to the sublime with an admirable fastness.
Heaney is back at the hob in the second poem of “Home Fires”, “A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden”. Shrinking “The Shield of Achilles” down to a stove lid, the poem moves from the pastiche (and overly arch) admiration of a youngster “Who loved a lifter made of stainless steel” straight into
“The way its stub claw found its clink-fast hold,
The fit and weight and danger as it bore
The red hot solidus to one side of the stove
For the fire-fanged maw of the fire-box
to be stoked . . . ”
A “solidus” is a late Roman and Byzantine coin, one of a number of Roman artefacts – from the warring testudo to the intrusive civilization of a villa – found in a collection where Heaney’s Latin has a habit of reasserting its imperial connections. The “red hot” currency of these lines recalls the time “When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity / The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids” from “Terminus” in The Haw Lantern of 1987. More obliquely and suggestively, the poem also brings to mind Heaney’s reflections on Gerard Manley Hopkins, “‘The Fire i’ the Flint’” (1975), in which Heaney the critic moved his thoughts on the poet’s art around the Shakespearean phrase of his title and Robert Frost’s declaration that “like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting”. “A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden” lauds the stoked engine of the imagination, certainly, but, with its overtones of empire, economic and military force, the fires of hatred, hell and destruction, it is also a fitting tribute to Auden’s careful handling of other burning things. After “Audensque”, the dull imitation of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” that Heaney penned for Joseph Brodsky in his previous volume, Electric Light (2001), “A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden” acts as a relief. It is a small, hot poem to place beside Auden’s cool report of how “The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day”, a fitting tribute that pays off a bad debt.
Electric Light was originally to be called “The Real Names”, which would have been a good title for what was a not very good collection. A similar directory of friends, family, authors and acquaintances can be found in the pages of District and Circle. Heaney will write a disposable anecdote about Ted Hughes remembering T. S. Eliot, and give the occasional friendly wave or reminiscence that relies too much on charm. But here, despite the odd complacency, the real names drop more softly from the page and function as a way of orientating round a village that has gone global. Among those present and former locals whom the reader couldn’t be expected to have heard of is the Boston fireman Bobby Breen, whose name, written on a helmet once presented to Heaney, is used to bring the collapse of the World Trade Center home to writer and reader.
Treating great poets, too, like locals makes what could have been mere exercises in backslapping, or exhibits at the heritage site, far more attractive. What Wordsworth the man achieved with a pen is traced by remembering what Wordsworth the boy could do with a pair of skates. “Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road” takes this tendency to its logical conclusion. Walking by a hedge hiding the entwined bodies of Eamon Murphy and Teresa Brennan, the dead poet is like “one of the Evans brothers” from down the road, “sandy moustached and freckled / From being, they said, with Monty in the desert”. The description of Edward Thomas at last returning from Keith Douglas’s war back to Heaney’s home turf, as if he had become another Northern Irishman with a Welsh surname, is both evocative and curiously ill-fitting. But the ways in which the poem doesn’t quite work are of a piece with some of the ways that it and other poems succeed in conveying a dislocated impression of the Second World War, mainly from the standpoint of Heaney’s boyhood in rural County Derry.
“The Aerodrome” recalls that “Wherever the world was, we were somewhere else”. Yet the world’s war keeps coming back, whether in the person of an in-law home from service as a stretcher-bearer or in the shape of Polish railway sleepers now used to landscape Heaney’s garden. The violence of the Troubles is similarly mistimed and misplaced. A nod at Heaney’s father by the local B-Men is a nod forward to shootings of the future. The prose poem “One Christmas Day in the Morning” first imagines a sixty-year-old Tommy Evans, then recalls how talking to him in a pub at the height of the Troubles made Heaney remember Evans’s childhood use of an airgun. The targets keep moving, but there’s no doubt that there is a time and place where bullets lodge.
Forty years on from Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney is still returning to his early years round the farm at Mossbawn. He also returns to earlier poems and their subjects. When the lyric “The Blackbird of Glanmore” treats of the death of Heaney’s younger brother, it makes for a powerful late companion piece to “Mid-Term Break” that more than justifies any going over of old ground. On the other hand, by revisiting the Tollund Man and the Danish bogland, the site not just of celebrated poems in Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), but also of “Tollund” in The Spirit Level (1996), Heaney risks one return too many. With its “Scone of peat, composite bog-dough / They trampled like a muddy vintage”, the sonnet sequence “The Tollund Man in Springtime” may overcook its old ingredients. However, the sequence has moments that are memorable less for the handling of chthonic matter than for Heaney’s uneasy confrontation with a contemporary, technologized world, where he detects
“Newfound contrariness.
In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those
queues
Of wired, far-faced smilers.
The title poem, “District and Circle”, is a journey into the London Underground that recalls a world above in light of
long since mysterious day,
Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay
On body-heated mown grass regardless,
A resurrection scene minutes before
The resurrection, habitués
Of their garden of delights, of staggered
summer.”
There’s a glimpse of idling turned to what looks like sexual activity in “lay”, and the impression of the unheavenly heat of sybaritic flesh in the grass. As a prophetic diagnosis of a Bosch-like overland and contemporary anomie, the lines invite comparison with Geoffrey Hill’s recent long poems. However, rather than venting spleen at high pitch, Heaney shows a measured control and modulation of tone. The rare true-rhyming couplet, and the dropping of the unstressed first syllable before “Parks”, signals the quickened pace of urbane satire; the syllable-heavy thoughts at the end of this passage convert litany to reflection. “Staggered” (a word that recurs in the collection) may refer to intermittent sunshine, and to the intoxication of “the sunners”, but it also seems to conjure the wounded from the July 7 bombings.
In a collection of familiar forms and inspirations, “District and Circle” comes nearest to seeming separate and something of a departure. Yet if it is a particularly fine and balanced poem which resists Heaney’s penchant for commonplaces of the underworld, it gains some of its effects from the use of significant images that connect to the poems around and before it in a way that reminds one of the strengths of the collection as a whole. Passing a busker playing a tin whistle, Heaney arms the encounter with thoughts of how he’d “trigger and untrigger a hot coin” before he and the busker give each other the “nod”. If locals are everywhere, so too are their checkpoints. In such conditions, the value of a poet who can grip and weigh up the hot coins and stove lids of this world are as apparent as ever.
