In his millennial collection District and Circle (2006), Seamus Heaney circles backward in time to recover memories of previous poems and the districts of his rural Irish childhood: Mossbawn, Anahorish and Moyulla. The desire to renew one’s attachment to a district arises in part as a response to the scale of dislocation caused by 9/11 and global terrorism. Like the District and Circle lines of the London Tube, the journey he takes is both linear and circular – a downward spiral in the manner of Dante’s pilgrim. Thus Heaney’s collection exemplifies, with brilliant and beautiful economy, how the ancient genre of a descent to the underworld still serves to frame and make sense of individual experience …
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