CPR: Seamus Heaney's District and Circle by David Wheatley

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Facilis descensus Averni, Virgil wrote in book six of the Aeneid: the descent to the underworld is easy. Seamus Heaney began and ended his 1991 collection Seeing Things with trips to the same location, courtesy of Virgil and Dante, and in the title poem of his new book, District and Circle, he takes a trip on the London underground. The sound of a tin whistle in the first line suggests we may be dealing with worlds within worlds, and sure enough the poem soon finds itself ghosted by other “underground” presences from Heaney’s past.

The thought that riding the Tube should involve a painful memory of family ghosts and “all that I belonged to” is probably not one that occurs to the average London commuter (or at least not before July 2005), but so far does Heaney’s childhood seem from a modern urban environment, the way he tells it, it may as well be Virgil’s underworld. A central theme of District and Circle, as in so many other Heaney books, is the blessed world of the poet’s youth and how to protect and cherish its memory.

Still in the title poem Heaney makes several references to keeping his balance, and in more ways than one this is poetry that never loses its footing. Heaney the consummate technician is on show throughout, from the splendid translations from Rilke, Cavafy, Horace, and Eoghan O Súilleabháin to the terza rima of “The Lift” and the bouncing amphibrachs of “To Mick Joyce in Heaven.” Heaney is famously a poet of checks and balances, always at pains to see both points of view and reluctant to speak out of turn. This is mirrored in his almost obsessively balanced and symmetrical figures of speech. He is particularly fond of doubling up on verbs and nouns, fitting no fewer than four examples into the last two and a half lines of “Súgán,” with its description of plaiting a rope:

breeze on my back,

Sun in my face, a power to bind and loose

Eked out and into each last tug and lap.

Hay ropes vie with the “turnip-snedder,” Christmas day and a trip to Lourdes in the picture of childhood that District and Circle builds up. At times the mood of pious remembering verges on thank you notes for Christmas presents, with Heaney ensuring that no wise elder from his childhood (the barber, the butcher, the blacksmith) goes unacknowledged. When the young Heaney steps out of line in “The Sally Rod”, with its account of how “Miss Walls / Lost her head and cut the legs off us / For dirty talk we didn’t think she’d hear” the real misdemeanour is that the poet couldn’t manage something more transgressive than such an insipid little tale.

The tendency in recent Heaney to reference his back catalogue is a risky strategy: revisiting “The Tollund Man,” “Tollund” was one of the best poems in The Spirit Level, but “The Tollund Man in Springtime” here wades into its Danish bog again to no obvious purpose. The real meat on the bone comes in poems such as “Nonce Words,” “Home Help” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore,” where the pain of loss disarms the decencies and decorum of Heaney’s style to go beyond nostalgia to genuine pathos.

Seldom can a major poet have been blessed with as pacific and well-adjusted a temperament as Heaney’s, and it is probably futile this far into his career to suggest he cultivate an inner evil twin, if only for the sake of variety. Where his contemporary Derek Mahon is the great laureate of doubt and instability, Heaney has made a lifelong virtue of reliability, even predictability, of going on and vindicating the blessings of a happy life. If Mahon is Coleridge, Heaney is the most Wordsworthian of modern writers (there is a poem here on Wordsworth’s skates, and another on Dorothy Wordsworth).

In “A Shiver” Heaney describes the act of swinging a hammer and the release of its potential energy, “Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage / About to be let fly.” Throughout these poems there is a tremendous sense of stored-up energy, but only occasionally do we witness its full release. There is something endlessly patient and solid about Heaney’s work, but which at the same time militates against surprise. If this is a weakness, it is one that derives from just how familiar the formally flawless Heaney poem has become over the years. It is a remarkable instrument, which makes it all the stranger that that his most humanly moving poems are those which owe least to the unflappable Heaney persona we know so well.

In the larger scheme of his oeuvre, District and Circle is an improvement on his last book, Electric Light, which had an excessively dutiful feel to it, without reaching the heights of Field Work. It is a tremendously accomplished book by a writer of enormous skill and talent, but to call it “transitional” may be just the compliment Heaney needs at this stage of his career. Having proved himself yet again with this his twelfth collection, perhaps his next book will surprise himself as well as his readers with something entirely new.