District and Circle is a poetry collection by Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was published in 2006 and won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. The collection also won the Irish Times "Poetry Now Award". Reporting on the Eliot Prize, the BBC commented in 2007, "The award is yet more confirmation, as if it was needed, of Heaney's reputation as, arguably, the English language's greatest living bard, whom author Malcolm Bradbury once described as 'the poet of poets'." In 2013, Heaney's volumes made up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in Britain. The poet dedicated District and Circle to the Canadian professor of Irish Studies Ann Saddlemyer. Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.

Contents

Critical reception

The poetry in District and Circle has been widely and positively reviewed by the critics. On Bookmarks Magazine Sep/Oct 2006 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.5 out of 5) based on critic reviews with a critical summary saying, "Critics describe Heaney’s newest book of poetry as original, startling, authentic, even supernatural—and his strongest collection in two decades". In the Observer Review Andrew Motion wrote, "Due in large part to the richness of his language, and also to the undiminished freshness of his response to time-honoured things, its consolidations have the feel of celebrations. The book does not merely dig in, but digs deep." The poet and critic Stephanie Burt also praised the book, writing that "anyone who isn’t impressed isn’t listening." Brad Leithauser, in The New York Times, praised Heaney for "saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say". The critic Peter McDonald said "The book contains marvellous prose-poems on the peopled landscapes of his schooldays, along with sonnets - seemingly effortless in their sheer fluency, but memorably tough and intent". Stephen Knight wrote that District and Circle was not "as immediate as his earlier work," but he still considered the book to be successful on its own terms, characterizing it as "a late flowering."