To enter the pages of Seamus Heaney's latest collection of poems, his first in five years, is to be "Flicker-lit." Like being hurtled through a dark space, as in the underground train of the title poem, reading Heaney is to be sparked with language, or should I say language-sparked?

	"DISTRICT AND CIRCLE" By Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($20)

Two words jammed into one is a Heaney linguistic signature, along with the Anglo-Saxon texture of words like "tilth," "kerb" and "kesh water" (whatever that is). Heaney's poems are almost a dialect, inviting you into bogs and barnyards with Irish cows and men who love the craft and heft of hand-forged tools.

With Heaney, remembering your first haircut is to hear the "cold smooth creeping steel and snicking scissors." To think about the English poet Wordsworth's ice skates in a display case is to feel the "whet and scud of steel on placid ice" -- language you can taste as you roll it on your tongue.

The sepia-toned cover photo shows an unidentified young Irishman in three-piece wool, watch-fobbed, Sunday best, his right arm on a big-bellied, iron apparatus with a hand crank. It's "The Turnip-Snedder" of the opener poem, which brings you into a bygone "age of bare hands/and cast iron,/the clamp-on meat-mincer,/the double fly-wheeled water-pump."

In this pastoral Irish countryside, war and violence are distant and yet a felt presence. As Americans pass through "Anahorish 1944" to assemble for Normandy, Heaney's anonymous narrator recalls a morning of pig slaughter, "sunlight and gutter-blood/Outside the slaughterhouse."

No one knew where they were headed, "like youngsters/As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets."

Plain talk and barnyards place Heaney in the lineage of citizen-poet farmers such as Robert Frost. In a 1999 essay, Heaney likened his friend British poet Ted Hughes to Caedmon, the first English poet, a farmhand "with a harp under one arm and a bundle of fodder under the other."

The image sits well on Heaney, whose career includes a 1995 Nobel Prize and whose remarkable language facility enabled him to turn "Beowulf," the tongue-twister Old English classic, into a best seller.

Nevertheless, as a 21st-century poet of the pastoral, he verges perilously toward a nostalgia out of place in a post-9/11, global-capitalist world, and he courts parody.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Heaney is well-flattered in a recent poem by Billy Collins, called "Irish Poetry," with lines such as "the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad."

To readers conditioned to Collins and many other contemporary poets of cool, ironic wit and the urban-pop sensibility of post-modernism, Heaney can register as a throwback. As far as his poems tell us, for instance, he hasn't heard of rock 'n' roll or movies.

Despite his earthy solidity, he has a foot in the camp of modernism, with allegiance to T.S. Eliot, writing for readers willing to enter in and pry open a poem with knowledge the poem itself doesn't give.

In "District and Circle," the five-poem title sequence, Heaney describes riding the London subway. Unless you know he's referring to the Edgeware Road station, where the District and Circle lines converge, site of 2005 terrorist bombs, you miss much of the resonance of a poem in which death is a ghostly presence.

In an underground world that recalls the London of Eliot's "Waste Land," the final sentence fragment, "Flicker-lit," rings with gratitude for life as it tolls its fragility.

If Heaney asks more attention than busy lives easily allow, he amply repays with a surpassingly beautiful poem such as "The Lift," about an open-air funeral for a much loved woman; the poem, like its subject, too reticent to say whom.

Many of Heaney's best poems, such as "Clearances" -- about peeling potatoes with his mother -- speak in a similar voice of restrained elegy, and "The Lift" prefaces a series of such poems in this book, including a remembrance of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.

Heaney's voice in general is that of a sober, mature elder with a rich imagination. "The Tollund Man in Springtime" speaks through the fourth-century B.C. cadaver found in the peat bogs of Denmark. When the poem says, "Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable/Solid standing and readiness to wait/These I learned from," you feel Heaney's own reserved observing.

In "Fiddleheads," a Japanese friend complains to Heaney about the scarcity of eroticism in his work. Heaney answers, less than convincingly, with "To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff," a poem that celebrates crab apple jelly and speaks in uncharacteristic effusions: "O my Pablo of earthlife."

The expansive sensuality of the great Chilean poet is not Heaney's farmstead realism. Still, Heaney gives all the answer he needs with "Tate's Avenue," a love poem of deliciously understated discretion.

Far from least for local readers comes "Quitting Time," in which a great Irish poet begins to sound as if he's from Pittsburgh: "Night after nightness, redding up the work."