Harsh light of reality heats Heaney's poems
District and Circle
By Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 78 pp., $20
In one of his essays, Seamus Heaney describes the power of poetry as ``the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality." Throughout the Nobel laureate's most recent collection of poems, `` District and Circle, " the imagination seems not only to press against reality but to plunge it in a cleansing solution. The world shines up from these pages with refreshed particularity and tactile exactitude. Who else can so expertly conjure the precise physics of lifting a sledge hammer, the sagging heft of beef in butchers paper, the ``cold smooth creeping steel and knicking scissors" of a childhood haircut? Everywhere in this collection, Heaney's speedy inventiveness pushes up against the real.
`` District and Circle" proves such a strong book, however, because that pressure runs in both directions. Heaney's title refers to a line on the London Underground, but the phrase itself suggests a pervasive pull between the local and the global: If the physical objects become clarified by the imagination in these poems, so the imagination ends up conveying the imprint of the world at large.
These external forces are often ominous. Specifically, the events of 9/11 throw their shadows across the poems. In a free translation of Horace, Heaney writes, ``Anything can happen, the tallest towers / Be overturned."
Troubling notes reverberate even when the poet remembers his rural, Northern Irish childhood. In the first lyric in the book, ``The Turnip-Snedder," Heaney describes that hand-operated slicing machine like this: ``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.' "
These lines have all of Heaney's characteristic tone, his immediate texture. But the physical details lead to a moment of reckoning, the statement (adapted from a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid) about God as Reaper. This may seem a somber tone with which to begin a book. Yet implicit in this moment lies a huge question: How can the poet find, and offer, some form of renewal without evading the fact of suffering?
Heaney's not the kind of writer to give pat answers. But in poem after poem, he responds to that dark vision by establishing and rendering connections between the living and the dead. Two poems about deceased siblings are particularly affecting. In ``The Lift," an elegy for the poet's sister, he balances high-church lyric lines (``Whole requiems at the sight of plants and gardens" ) against the bare facts of the modern world, such as ``the throttle and articulated whops" of a helicopter passing the funeral cortege. In ``The Blackbird of Glanmore," a lyric that he braids along a trellis of cunning half rhymes and refrains, Heaney considers the bird as a messenger between this world and the next. The blackbird turns out, in fact, to be an avatar of Heaney's brother, who died as a small child, and whom Heaney elegized in his first book, ``Death of a Naturalist," published 40 years ago.
Such a scenario might easily have drifted into mere hocus-pocus. But Heaney grounds his departures in the facts of the physical world.
Throughout ``District and Circle, " Heaney fashions his links between the living and the dead by interweaving the textures of contemporary life with those of artistic history. In the title poem, a seemingly humdrum ride on the subway echoes Aeneas' descent into the underworld. In ``Midnight Anvil," a friend of the poet's, the blacksmith Barney Devlin, rings in the millennial New Year on his anvil, and Devlin's nephew in Edmonton, Alberta , hears the clangs at that very moment, thanks to a cell phone held in the air. Indeed, there's something both of the anvil and the cell phone in Heaney's work. Here's a poet obsessed with both the ancient traditions of craftsmanship and with the wonders and terrors of the global age. And he manages to convey such themes in the smallest details.
One of the most emblematic images in the book appears in ``Helmet," a poem occasioned by, and titled after, a gift that a Boston firefighter-poet gave to Heaney. Here's how ``Helmet" opens: ``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."
It's hard to read ``Helmet" without hearing larger themes. Especially since 9/11, we're apt to see firefighters as heroic harrowers. Later in the poem, Heaney conjures the frightening work itself. But these themes remain rooted in the details, ``the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs." Like the firefighters, who are both selfless heroes entering infernos to save lives and simply guys around the neighborhood, Heaney's poems circle between the everyday and the otherworldly.
Peter Campion's book of poems, `` Other People, " was published last fall. He teaches at Washington College, in Maryland. 
