DISTRICT AND CIRCLE

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 21st 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. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World…