District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

District and Circle by Seamus HeaneySeamus 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. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the 'heavyweight silence' of

that led the Empire State Building to be constructed in barely a year - and how the same techniques brought a quiet English debutante to become an acclaimed jungle guerrilla fighter

Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother

It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo

stripy tie

stretching across two millennia

resignation and hope

Ruth’s journey begins with her mother

compulsively readable story of mothers and daughters

important and original

through Dublin Docklands

The damaged horse is then sold to various masters at whose hands he experiences cruelty and neglect

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward