With more relish and conviction than ever Seamus Heaney maintains his trust inthe obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.Seamus Hea... » 

With more relish and conviction than ever Seamus Heaney maintains his trust inthe obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.Seamus Heaneys new collection starts in an age of bare hands and cast iron and as the authomatic lock clunks shut in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twentyfirst 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 stronly 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. «