Human Chain »

Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. He has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Seamus Heaney’s new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present—the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other “hermit songs” that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet’s early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled “Route 101” plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular.

Human Chain also includes a poetic “herbal” adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included

The Barnes & Noble Review

Heaney has always been the archaeologist and ethnologist of his own childhood, recognizing that the dialect and implements he grew up with, the old way of life led by Irish farmers, were all disappearing in his lifetime. Now seventy years old, and writing in the gathering shadow of mortality -- not long ago Heaney suffered a stroke, an event that appears in several poems -- his recollections of things past have become even more movingly elegiac.

"Had I not been awake" 3

Album 4

The Conway Stewart 8

Uncoupled 9

The Butts 11

Chanson d'Aventure 13

Miracle 16

Human Chain 17

A Mite-Box 18

An Old Refrain 19

The Wood Road 21

The Baler 23

Derry Derry Down 25

Eelworks 27

Slack 32

A Herbal 35

Canopy 45

The Riverbank Field 47

Route 110 49

Death of a Painter 58

Loughanure 59

Wraiths 63

Sweeney Out-takes 66

Colum Cille Cecinit 69

Hermit Songs 71

"Lick the pencil" 78

"The door was open and the house was dark" 81

In the Attic 82

A Kite for Aibhin 85