District and Circle at 20 | A Seminar with Stephen O’Neill and Rosie Lavan
Cyril Byrne, Irish Times
Join us as we celebrate Seamus Heaney’s penultimate collection of poems, 'District and Circle' with Stephen O’Neill and Rosie Lavan.
Seamus Heaney’s penultimate collection of poems, District and Circle, turns twenty this year. Its international and environmental concerns were immediately recognised, as Heaney turned to confront the shock of 9/11 and 7/7, and found a voice for what he called “ecological lament”. In this seminar, Stephen O’Neill and Rosie Lavan, from the School of English at TCD, will explore the book’s impact and legacy through focused discussion of selected poems, to ask where District and Circle might lead us now, twenty years on.
This seminar is offered as part of 'First Principles: Editing Seamus Heaney', a collaboration between the School of English at Trinity College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland’s Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition.
Details and tickets for the events on Saturday 7th November are available here
Stephen O’Neill is a Teaching Fellow in British and Irish Writing at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955 is out with Liverpool University Press.
Rosie Lavan is an associate professor in the School of English at Trinity. She is the co-editor, with Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis, of The Poems of Seamus Heaney (2025).
