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Seamus Heaney, District and Circle

Review: Munayem Mayenin, Editor

Faber & Faber

Pages: 76

Price: £8.99

ISBN: 0-571-23097-0

                ‘And so by night and day to be transported

                Through galloried earth with them, the only relic

                Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,

                Reflecting in a window, mirror-backed

                By basted weeping rock walls, flicker-lit.’ (District and Circle)

Following a five-year think silence in terms of publishing, Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection has appeared, with all the Heaney hallmarks of absolute mastery of language. An almost architectural precision make-over means that everyday life, living, and reminiscence offer the readers a poetry that ‘afterwards’ resonates depth, grace, and a disturbed but melancholy calm. Layers of the ordinary create musical opening of ‘rust, thistles, silence, sky’ (Polish Sleepers).

 Heaney’s greatness does not lie in the life which he inhales with absolute resolution; rather, it germinates out of his utmost determination to grasp life with all its splendour, grace, and multitude. In the process, he becomes as big as that life, so that the presentation of it becomes complete, almost impersonal and sage-like, as thought the shallow sensitivity has become wiped out and the depths of experience can fully be touched. This does not, of course, mean that pain or agony, thrills or joys, do not touch him. They do. Yet they only touch him the way raindrops touch an ocean. Heaney, as always, writes poetry of waves and ripples and currents of life that rain on his ocean. And does he feel the pain? Does he still feel the joys? Does he get moved by deep-rooted faith, conviction in something that is almost eternally singing away? Indeed he does and District and Circle is more depth and sphere than circling round.

 Heaney comes in, observes The Blackbird of Glenmore ‘on the grass when I arrive’ and ‘in the ivy when I leave’ and he finds his life between these two points. Life’s unfolding drama, the living, the reminiscence, and the joy of holding all these in is presented in a language that is as mysterious as the bird glistening between the light green-grey and dark green ivy:

                 ‘Hedge-hop, I am absolute

                For you, your ready talkback,

                Your each stand-offish comeback,

                Your picky, nervy gold beak –

                On the grass where I arrive

                In the ivy where I leave.’

In this jittery world of post 9/11 and 7/7 Anything can Happen: ‘the heaven’s weight./ Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid./ Capstones shift, nothing restless right./ Telluric ash and firespores boil away.’ Yet in The Aerodrome we hear Heaney’s crafts:

 ‘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.’

District and Circle takes us to a state of deeper appreciation of Heaney, who is not just a poet but an artist who uses language like clay, or stone, or wood, or whatever he needs and creates something that goes deeper, wider, broader, and truer to life. This is a great collection, with the definitive signs and signature of a craftsman of life who writes poetry that takes us where nothing else does. As always, Heaney proves that he writes necessary poetry that opens up avenues of enrichment if we were to live life and forget about necessity, market, selling, and buying. Here is living thriving in Heaney.

Faber & Faber must be congratulated for getting this sapphire or a collection out, which should be read the way one reads the silence of a moonlit nigh. May Heaney continue writing great poetry and break the language so that we get endless and unpredictable becomings of life.

The New York Poets II An Anthology

Review: Philip Ruthen. London. August 2006.

Edited by Mark Ford and Trevor Winkfield
Carcanet 2006 www.carcanet.co.uk
Price: £12.95 Pages: 216

ISBN 1 85754 821 3

Poems by: Edwin Denby, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie, Harry Mathews, Ted Berrigan, Joseph Ceravolo, Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, Charles North, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer.


‘For my sins I live in the city of New York

Whitman’s city lived in in Melville’s senses, urban inferno

Where love can stay for only a minute

Then has to go, to get some work done…’

(from ‘Whitman in Black’ Ted Berrigan)


Poetry of mythic dimensions, or puzzling but ordinary? It was hard to remember a time when displays of poetic experimentation and word design as presented by these poets were fresh and astoundingly original – which speaks volumes for their influence, and yet invites questions as to substance within the works. This anthology builds upon, but doesn’t quite capture the fullness of the first volume, issued in 2004. There, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler have selections of their work in a single volume presented together for the first time. Editing this anthology of the work of ten of potential poets who are, in historical time, of the same and subsequent generation of the ‘above’ four, and who would be unlikely to ascribe themselves to any particular ‘school’, ‘language institution’ or ‘manifesto’, is always likely to allow the seams of compromises to occasionally show. The closer association with the New York Museum of Modern Art and the comparative entwined arts arenas of 1950’s and 60’s New York brings, ironically, more definition to the poetic movement of that ‘earlier time’ presented in the first anthology.

This second anthology, it should be remembered, is not about O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler, despite their continuing gestures through poetry and introductions. It is however, an attempt to allow the ranging of the eleven related poets to be foregrounded by their own performances over the period of approximately the mid 1960’s to 1980, from where most of the poems are drawn. The Poetry Project, from St. Mark’s Church, East 10th Street, is in many ways the real subject for a biography of this epoch. The poetry selected for the anthology, has, despite the differences, a language of connection with a certain home, whose characteristics – irreverence, in-jokes, wit and crucially, the re-ordering of previously accepted writing styles, genres and content - were absorbed into wider radical design. The New York Poets’ poetic-political ramifications are perhaps belatedly being discovered, although the word design itself has significantly influenced transatlantic poetry:



‘Certain words disappear from a language:

…or become something else:
transport. Mack
the truck driver falls for a waitress
where the water flows.

…I love her! Want to
marry her! Have hamburgers!
Have hamburgers! Have hamburgers!’

(from ‘Louisiana Perch’ Ron Padgett)

Over the reach of four decades, the Poetry Project has provided writing, performance and publication programmes, and a forum for poet-led public literary arts. For the eleven New York Poets represented here, it became a meeting place and departure point for the poetic community and to a greater or lesser extent enabled their collaborative outlooks and actual poetic projects.

The editors, Mark Ford and Trevor Winkfield, needed to produce a text that an uninitiated reader would both be intrigued by and then enticed into the mythic dimensions of the poets and their places of belonging. My view is that they succeeded in forging a willingness to find out more, to compare contemporary poets and poetry with the influences, language, innovation, and revelations that the poetry selected displays. In the succinct general introduction, and the equally informative and focused introductions to each poet, the editors have provided enough information and context to enable the poetry to become the main subject between the pages. These introductions, and the associated select bibliographies, reveal crucial aspects of the literary and cultural relevance of the poetic innovations. Without these, my comprehension of the New York Poets would have been more limited. In arriving from what was essentially the fringe avant-garde in the USA, the poets continued to transform modernist poetry into both ‘rarefied’ art - despite a new use of street idiom - and at its best, brought new revelations of the association between poetry, ourselves, and how we are and think:

‘The women without hesitancy began to descend
leaving flowers-

Ceres harried-bragged of cultivated grain-

I saw Hecate. the gray-wrapped woman.
in lumpy dark.’

(from ‘The Farewell Stairway’ after Balla, Barbara Guest)


‘Centennial of Melville’s birth this morning.

Whale balloons drift up released by priests. Whale Boats parade

followed by aldermen in a ritual skiff propelled by “surf” –girls…’

(from ‘Japanese City’, Kenward Elmslie)

Whether there is enough in this anthology, in quantity, and, at times, quality, is an open question. Quality, I recognise, is defined in this instance by what the reader is aware of, and if some of the poems seem shy of their subjects, or seemingly limited in scope, familiarity with aspects of innovative word design practise could overcome this. The reason Ron Padgett’s work spoke out from this anthology was due also to distant echoes of his word design and associative structuring occurring occasionally in a colleague’s recent work. I’ve no evidence whatsoever that this recent work has any connection at all with Ron Padgett. This possible trace took me to revisit Harry Mathews’ poetry, recalling the initial sense of a patterning link from ‘The Devoted Spy’ with Ron Padgett’s ‘Famous Flames’; then appeared connection and difference in stylistics in their prose poems; and further exploration of the significant proportion of prose-poems and ‘micro-fiction’ pieces that were common features of the majority of poets represented.

‘Where are the brass islands?
There are the brass islands.
Their yellow wheat does not bend, and their peaks
Ring, flat. Their brass ports
Have a stupid glory in thin dusk –‘

(from ‘The Devoted Spy’ Harry Mathews)

‘…I take seriously the Tao Teh Ching

and I always bark like a dog,
with the gray silhouette of a factory
against a deep red sky
and it is the France of Zola,
he whose high heels clicked
against a marble bust of Pallas.
These gentlemen are very interesting.
Take Montaigne. A peculiar guy, and
very interesting…’

(from ‘Famous Flames’ Ron Padgett)

The New York Poets’ contemporary resonances diffuse within the collective unconscious to re-emerge as ‘acceptable’ or rather, recognisable freeplay – the reader and listener ready for the experience of wanting the new associations because they have, somewhere, somehow, in the linguistic cultures since the mid-50’s, been exposed to the constructs. The poetry from The New York Poets, in its very irony, challenge, banality and originality could be dismissed as indulgence or taken as the obvious and first choices of ways of writing the world and the poet’s and populace’s experiences. In this second anthology, the relevance of The New York Poets’ work becomes shown as their poetry, personalities and lived associations continue to move through time and cultures.

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