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District and Circle
By Seamus Heaney
Faber, 76pp, $29.95hb, $24.95pb
The Goldfinches of Baghdad
By Robert Adamson
Flood Editions, Chicago, 103pp, $24.95
OF the present epoch, historians will eventually ask: what were the poets doing? How did the slaughter, torture and dread show in their work? How did they engage with events (if they engaged at all)? What atmosphere -- think of the British poets circa 1939-45 -- did the work give off?
These two books, both consummate achievements, have public horrors very much in mind. One, by Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney, invests in a notion of privacy, local speech and in a provincial rural life far from war. The other, by the fine Australian poet Robert Adamson, strikes an exquisite, elegiac note by a river, the darkness of which flows through the mind of the poet who doubts if his poems serve anyone but himself.
One book wishes to turn away from the war, and is a reminder of what Heaney once wrote: "The end of art is peace." The other broods in ways that let the war in.
Heaney's first poetic response to the September 11 attacks was a translation of Horace.
"It's about Horace being shaken to the very core because he hears thunder unexpectedly," he recently told an audience in Edinburgh; the gods have brought "forward causes not known". Heaney added his own stanza about "the tallest towers" and called it Anything Can Happen.
The poem is not that powerful but the title's impact lies in its placement in his book. It follows The Turnip-Snedder, which looks innocently bucolic until the vivid last two stanzas about "the juiced up inner blades" that drop "its raw sliced mess/ bucketful by glistening bucketful". The next poem, A Shiver, is also deceptively rudimentary: it is about swinging a...