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Seamus Heaney’s new collection starts “In an age of bare hands / and cast iron” and ends as “The automatic lock / Clunks shut” in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Scenes from a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that “Anything can happen,” and other images from the dangerous present—a fireman’s helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier—are fraught with this same anxiety.
But the volume, which includes some “found prose” and a number of translations, offers resistance as Heaney gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like “The Tollund Man in Springtime” and in several poems that do “the rounds of the district”—its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts—threats to the planet are intuited in the local place, yet a lyric force prevails. With more relish and conviction than ever, Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.
ALSO BY SEAMUS HEANEY
POETRY
Death of a Naturalist
Door into the Dark
Wintering Out
North
Field Work
Poems 1965–1975
Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish
Station Island
The Haw Lantern
Selected Poems 1966–1987
Seeing Things
Sweeney’s Flight (with photographs by Rachel Giese)
The Spirit Level
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996
Beowulf
Diary of One Who Vanished
Electric Light
CRITICISM
Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978
The Government of the Tongue
The Redress of Poetry
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001
PLAYS
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone
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District and Circle. Copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney.
All rights reserved.
For information, address FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX 19 Union Square West, New York 10003
e-ISBN 978-1-4668-5549-6
First eBook Edition: September 2013
FOR ANN SADDLEMYER
Call her Augusta
Because we arrived in August, and from now on
This month’s baled hay and blackberries and combines
Will spell Augusta’s bounty.
CONTENTS
Notes and Acknowledgements
The Turnip-Snedder
A Shiver
Polish Sleepers
Anahorish 1944
To Mick Joyce in Heaven
The Aerodrome
Anything Can Happen
Helmet
Out of Shot
Rilke: After the Fire
District and Circle
To George Seferis in the Underworld
Wordsworth’s Skates
The Harrow-Pin
Poet to Blacksmith
Midnight Anvil
Súgán
Senior Infants
1. The Sally Rod
2. A Chow
3. One Christmas Day in the Morning
The Nod
A Clip
Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road
Found Prose
1. The Lagans Road
2. Tall Dames
3. Boarders
The Lift
Nonce Words
Stern
Out of This World
1. “Like everybody else …”
2. Brancardier
3. Saw Music
In Iowa
Höfn
On the Spot
The Tollund Man in Springtime
Moyulla
Planting the Alder
Tate’s Avenue
A Hagging Match
Fiddleheads
To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff
Home Help
1. Helping Sarah
2. Chairing Mary
Rilke: The Apple Orchard
Quitting Time
Home Fires
1. A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth
2. A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden
The Birch Grove
Cavafy: “The rest I’ll speak of to the ones below in Hades”
In a Loaning
The Blackbird of Glanmore
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
These poems first appeared, many in slightly different versions, in Agenda, Agni, Harvard Review, Irish Pages, Metre, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Pretext II, The Guardian, Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, Scintilla, London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Salmagundi, Tatler, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Yellow Nib, Village, Waxwing Poems.
A number of the poems also appeared in A Shiver (Clutag, 2005). “Anything Can Happen,” along with a short essay and several translations, was included in a publication with that same title (Amnesty/Town House, 2004). “Tall Dames” is adapted from “A Gate Left Open,” a programme note for the Dublin performance of Janáček’s “Diary of One Who Vanished” (Gaiety Theatre, 14–16 October 1999); “Saw Music” appeared in The Door Stands Open (Irish Writers’ Centre, 2005). “On the Spot” was commissioned by Maurice Riordan and John Burnside for their anthology, Wild Reckoning (Picador, 2004).
The lines quoted in “To George Seferis in the Underworld” are from his poem “On Aspalathoi,” translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Complete Poems, Princeton University Press, 1995); the epigraph is from Roderick Beaton’s George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel (Yale University Press, 2003).
“The soul exceeds its circumstances” (p. 56) is quoted from Leon Wieseltier’s appreciation of Czeslaw Milosz, The New York Times Book Review, 12 September 2004. “B-Men” (p. 34) were the auxiliary B-Special Force of the former Royal Ulster Constabulary.
THE TURNIP-SNEDDER
For Hughie O’Donoghue
In an age of bare hands
and cast iron,
the clamp-on meat-mincer,
the double flywheeled water-pump,
it dug its heels in among wooden tubs
and troughs of slops,
hotter than body heat
in summertime, cold in winter
as winter’s body armour,
a barrel-chested breast-plate
standing guard
on four braced greaves.
“This is the way that God sees life,”
it said, “from seedling-braird to snedder,’
as the handle turned
and turnip-heads were let fall and fed
to the juiced-up inner blades,
“This is the turnip-cycle,”
as it dropped its raw sliced mess,
bucketful by glistering bucketful.
A SHIVER
The way you had to stand to swing the sledge,
Your two knees locked, your lower back shock-fast
As shields in a testudo, spine and waist
A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage;
The way its iron head pl
anted the sledge
Unyieldingly as a club-footed last;
The way you had to heft and then half-rest
Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage
About to be let fly: does it do you good
To have known it in your bones, directable,
Withholdable at will,
A first blow that could make air of a wall,
A last one so unanswerably landed
The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?
POLISH SLEEPERS
Once they’d been block-built criss-cross and four-squared
We lived with them and breathed pure creosote
Until they were laid and landscaped in a kerb,
A moulded verge, half-skirting, half-stockade,
Soon fringed with hardy ground-cover and grass.
But as that bulwark bleached in sun and rain
And the washed gravel pathway showed no stain,
Under its parched riverbed
Flinch and crunch I imagined tarry pus
Accruing, bearing forward to the garden
Wafts of what conspired when I’d lie
Listening for the goods from Castledawson …
Each languid, clanking waggon,
And afterwards, rust, thistles, silence, sky.
ANAHORISH 1944
“We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood
Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road
They would have heard the squealing,
Then heard it stop and had a view of us
In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.
Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.
Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.
Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,
Hosting for Normandy.
Not that we knew then
Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters
As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.”
TO MICK JOYCE IN HEAVEN
1.
Kit-bag to tool-bag,
Warshirt to workshirt—
Among farmer in-laws,
The way you tied sheaves
The talk of the country,
But out on your own
When skylined on scaffolds—
A demobbed Achilles
Who was never a killer,
The strongest instead
Of the world’s stretcher-bearers,
Turning your hand
To the bricklaying trade.
2.
Prince of the sandpiles,
Hod-hoplite commander
Watching the wall,
Plumbing and pointing
From pegged-out foundation
To first course to cornice,
Keeping an eye
On the eye in the level
Before the cement set:
Medical orderly,
Bedpanner, bandager
Transferred to the home front,
Rising and shining
In brass-buttoned drab.
3.
You spoke of “the forces,”
Had served in the desert,
Been strafed and been saved
By courses of blankets
Fresh-folded and piled
Like bales on a field.
No sandbags that time.
A softness preserved you.
You spoke of sex also,
Talked man to man,
Took me for granted:
The English, you said,
Would do it on Sundays
Upstairs, in the daytime.
4.
The weight of the trowel,
That’s what surprised me.
You’d lift its lozenge-shaped
Blade in the air
To sever a brick
In a flash, and then twirl it
Fondly and lightly.
But whenever you sent me
To wash it and dry it
And you had your smoke,
Its iron was heavy,
Its sloped-angle handle
So thick-spanned and daunting
I needed two hands.
5.
“To Mick Joyce in Heaven”—
The title just came to me,
Mick, and I started
If not quite from nowhere,
Then somewhere far off:
A bedroom, bright morning,
A man and a woman,
Their backs to the bedhead
And me at the foot.
It was your first leave,
A stranger arrived
In a house with no upstairs,
But heaven enough
To be going on with.
THE AERODROME
First it went back to grass, then after that
To warehouses and brickfields (designated
The Creagh Meadows Industrial Estate),
Its wartime grey control tower rebuilt and glazed
Into a hard-edged CEO style villa:
Toome Aerodrome had turned to local history.
Hangars, runways, bomb stores, Nissen huts,
The perimeter barbed wire, forgotten and gone.
But not a smell of daisies and hot tar
On a newly surfaced cart road, Easter Monday,
1944. And not, two miles away that afternoon,
The annual bright booths of the fair at Toome,
All the brighter for having been denied.
No catchpenny stalls for us, no
Awnings, bonnets, or beribboned gauds:
Had been and would be. Sparrows might fall,
B-26 Marauders not return, but the sky above
That land usurped by a compulsory order
Watched and waited—like me and her that day
Watching and waiting by the perimeter.
A fear crossed over then like the fly-by-night
And sun-repellent wing that flies by day
Invisibly above: would she rise and go
With the pilot calling from his Thunderbolt?
But for her part, in response, only the slightest
Back-stiffening and standing of her ground
As her hand reached down and tightened around mine.
If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN
after Horace, Odes, I, 34
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
HELMET
Bobby Breen’s. His Boston fireman’s gift
With BREEN in scarlet letters on its spread
Fantailing brim,
Tinctures of sweat and hair oil
In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs
Beneath the crown—
Or better say the crest, for crest it is—
Leather-trimmed, steel-r
idged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,
Tipped with a little bud of beaten copper …
Bobby Breen’s badged helmet’s on my shelf
These twenty years, “the headgear
Of the tribe,” as O’Grady called it
In right heroic mood that afternoon
When the fireman-poet presented it to me
As “the visiting fireman”—
As if I were up to it, as if I had
Served time under it, his fire-thane’s shield,
His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass
And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof
Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there
Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.
OUT OF SHOT
November morning sunshine on my back
This bell-clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut-firm
On the unseasonably warm
Top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock,
Catching gleams of the distant Viking vik
Of Wicklow Bay; thinking scriptorium,
Norse raids, night-dreads, and that “fierce raiders” poem
About storm on the Irish Sea—so no attack
In the small hours or next morning; thinking shock
Out of the blue or blackout, the staggered walk
Of 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 shot
Lost to its owner, lost for its sunlit hills.
RILKE: AFTER THE FIRE
Early autumn morning hesitated,
Shying at newness, an emptiness behind
Scorched linden trees still crowding in around
The moorland house, now just one more wallstead
Where youngsters gathered up from god knows where
Hunted and yelled and ran wild in a pack.
Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,
The son of the place, and with a long forked stick
Dragged an out-of-shape old can or kettle
From under hot, half burnt away house-beams;
And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,
Turned to the others present, at great pains
To make them realize what had stood so.