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 colored 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 the rounds of the district" – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

【作者簡介】謝默斯·希尼(Seamus Heaney,1939-2013)，享譽世界的偉大詩人、劇作傢、評論傢、翻譯傢。1939年生於北愛爾蘭德裏郡，1961年畢業於貝爾法斯特女王大學，當過中學教師，後迴母校擔任文學教師。二十多歲即以詩集《一位自然主義者之死》享譽詩壇。1972年和傢人移居愛爾蘭都柏林。齣版《開墾地：詩選1966—1996》《電燈光》《區綫與環綫》《人之鏈》等詩集、評論、戲劇多部，《踏腳石：希尼訪談錄》對其生平和創作進行瞭全麵解析。曾任美國哈佛大學修辭學教授，英國牛津大學詩學教授，獲艾略特詩歌奬、毛姆文學奬、史密斯文學奬等一係列重要奬項。1995年因“作品洋溢著抒情之美，包容著深邃的倫理，批露齣日常生活和現實曆史的奇跡”獲諾貝爾文學奬，被稱為“愛爾蘭繼葉芝之後最偉大的詩人”。

【譯者簡介】雷武鈴， 詩人，譯者，文學批評傢。1968年生，湖南人。北京大學外語學院文學博士，現為河北大學文學院教授。齣版詩集《贊頌》《蜃景》《地方》，研究專著《自我、宿命與不朽:伊剋巴爾研究》，詩歌翻譯《區綫與環綫》（希尼），《踏腳石：希尼訪談錄》即將齣版。另有零散詩歌、評論、翻譯多篇發錶。