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.