In the first, in a spirit akin to Edward Thomas, Heaney writes, “I’d lie/ Listening for the goods from Castledawson…/ Each languid, clanking wagon,/ And afterwards, rust, thistles, silence, sky…” In the second the arrival of American soldiers “hosting for Normandy” makes the locals feel “‘like youngsters / as they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.’” This recalls “The Toome Road” from the 1979 collection Field Work, where the speaker, finding a military convoy passing through his land at dawn, is able to affirm the durability of place as a form of resistance: “O charioteers, above your dormant guns,/ It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,/ The invisible, untoppled omphalos.” The contrasting sense of disempowerment in the more recent poem seems to derive from the nationality of the visitors, who represent the American imperium rather than the declining colonial power of the British.It is curious to find Heaney writing about powerlessness. A pair of sonnets on facing pages, “Polish Sleepers”and “Anahorish 1944″, subtly presents the competing claims of a free, contemplative consciousness and of the insistent larger world. In “Wordsworth’s Skates”, recalling the wonderful skating episode in The Prelude, Heaney moves swiftly past the relics to evoke “the reel of them of frozen Windermere/ As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve / And left it scored.” The musical pun is a bold one, affirming the permanence of Wordsworth’s art in the consciousness even of that vast public which may never read a page of Wordsworth or Heaney – for much of what we know of place derives from poetry.District and Circle does most of its work very quietly. What Heaney has done is reclaim, renew and give service to an element of Romanticism embodied in the work of one of his poetic masters, Wordsworth – the sense that in landscape lies wisdom and some guidance for the conduct of life.

The home landscape, with its now-famous names, such as Toome and Anahorish, both revisited here, has been a permanent and portable resource, as real a presence on the drafted page as in the physical fact.
Sketched in that way, Heaney’s career sounds like a recipe for reactionary provincialism, yet nothing could be farther from the case. Rituals of work, customs and courtesies are all of great importance for him. In imagination he has never strayed far from the original sites of his affections, though work and fame have carried him off and away into places and company apparently remote from the assurances of home. But the work of Heaney’s maturity suggests that sanity will continue to get his vote – as it has done for the 40 years since the publication of his first, hugely influential book Death of a Naturalist, which is republished alongside his new collection (his twelfth), District and Circle. The sanity that Heaney’s poetry commends and embodies is derived in large part from his devotion to the world of the ordinary – to the objects, the places and people and the way of life in which he grew up in rural Co Derry, where, as he has pointed out, poetry is not viewed as an especially significant matter. Buy it for the Dan Brown fan in your life.Matt Thorne’s latest novel is ‘Cherry’ (Phoenix).

“Why should not old men be mad?” asked WB Yeats. Seamus Heaney (born 1939) is not yet old, and, as he puts it in a version from Horace, “Anything can happen”. We have an update on Jerry, the son Delacour adopted, and enough bracing intelligence for this novel to work as much as critical theory as a detective story. Comnena did exist, and Kristeva goes into great detail about her Alexiad, packing the novel with descriptions of the First Crusade and Byzantium era without ever allowing this detail to swamp the narrative.There are brief mentions of the Raelians (the religious movement beloved of Michel Houellebecq); as well as lots of self-referential comedy, including references to Kristeva’s husband, Philippe Sollers. Although no one would mistake this for a mainstream thriller, Kristeva doesn’t skimp on plot or suspense. The novel is packed with doubles, secrets, shootings and random murders, with two main plots driving the action.A killer known as the Purifier is murdering members of a religious sect, and a professor named Sebastian Chrest-Jones (the uncle of Northrop Rilsky, Delacour’s sleuthing partner and love interest), disappears while working on a novel about the Byzantine princess-historian Anna Comnena. There is nothing wrong with this, especially given that the book is such fun.

But Delacour’s argument that there are few serious readers and far too many novels, while probably true, seems unnecessarily elitist – although she does get in an equally brilliant dismissal of literary fiction as “the rhetorical mode par excellence of perverts”.When Kristeva’s novel works best, it is with a post-punk energy similar to that of the late Kathy Acker (minus the porn). With this damning incitement of popular crime fiction Kristeva establishes that this mystery is intended for an audience of jaded intellectuals rather than the mass market. There is a deliberate parallel between Delacour’s attempt to resolve mysteries and understand her surroundings through journalism, and Kristeva’s use of the detective novel to express a truth that might be obscured in a different genre.Kristeva’s detective novels, however, are very different from those of most other practitioners. Delacour suggests that she is not “matronly enough to make one of those big tomes that Anglo-Saxon women put out with all the bile and bitter vaginal juices coming in razor cuts and gunfire”. Everything that happens in the world, from terrorism to developments in the mass media, has an influence on this resort. Santa Varvara has porous boundaries and is described as emblematic of the global village.

She also considers herself to be several other characters, such as the decapitated body of a gifted translator in the previous volume, Possessions – an honest admission of the narcissism essential to the creative process.
The novels take place in the imaginary Santa Varvara, a corrupt seaside resort somewhere in Eastern Europe. Kristeva is a legendary French psychoanalyst, critic and professor of linguistics. She was taught by Roland Barthes and is a central figure in French poststructuralist thought. Her novels are less well-known outside France, but are a significant part of her oeuvre. They feature Stephanie Delacour, a Parisian amateur detective and reporter whom Kristeva describes as an alter ego. Patricia Highsmith achieved this in her Ripley novels, and her essay “Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction” provides the epigraph to chapter four of Julia Kristeva’s fourth novel, Murder in Byzantium – a novel that opens with the most likeable of her main characters killing a Chinese lab assistant, Fa Chang, after having sex.