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 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 cattle out in rain - are coloured by a strongly contemporary sense that ''anything can happen'', and other images from the dangerous present - a journey on the underground, a melting glacier - are fraught with this same anxiety.

But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like ''The Tollund Man in Springtime'' and in several poems which ''do