Seamus Heaney --

-- has a new collection of poetry -- "District and Circle."

Sure, but the man can write (and think).

The description of the tone of the work, or its craft, or its seeming simplistic smash about one's emotional self I'll leave to the literary critics, but I will say most every line leaves a fellow aching with the beauty an artist can render with words.

Then there are the small delights of language in the hands of a master. In the title poem -- about a ride on the underground -- he describes one of those handles one holds onto, that hang from ceiling of the subway car, as a "roof-wort."

Or how about the pristine use of detail as in a poem about a blacksmith friend of Heaney's (or the poem's narrator, at least) in Ireland who banged hammer to anvil 12 times to mark the new millennium and a nephew in Edmonton hearing it over a cellphone "Held high as a horse's ear,/"

It's there a lad could start to believe god exists...