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English Summary/英文概要： 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 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:
Again the growl
Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble
Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal
Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.
(from ’District and Circle’)
Chinese Summary/中文概要： District and Circle是诺贝尔奖获得者Seamus Heaney所著的诗歌集。这是最新的一部作品，与他首部作品Death of a Naturalist的出版日期相隔40年之久，并于2006年摘取T. S. Eliot Prize 奖项。 本卷诗歌中的主题在作者其它作品中也有反复出现，尤其是对艺术和艺术创作﹑当地风俗习惯和暴力形象的诠释。 然而，正是对过往主题的不断重复我们才了解到作者想用自己的方式让我们意识到很多人和事都发生了巨大的变化。作者并不是泛泛所指，而是指我们言谈的方式和具体内容。(Ruby Yang)
Awards/获奖情况： In 1991, Seeing Things was published. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1995 for what the Nobel committee described as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". In 1996, his collection The Spirit Level was published and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Heaney’s latest volume of poetry, District and Circle, won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2009, Heaney was presented with an Honorary-Life Membership award from the UCD Law Society, in recognition of his remarkable role as a literary figure. In 2009 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.
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