Book description
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, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly
minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems which stand at
the crossroads of oral and written, and other 'hermit songs' which
weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's
early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled 'Route 110'
plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single
moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s adolescence to the birth of
the poet's first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas
for the dead - friends, neighbours and family - which is yet wholly
and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also adapts a poetic 'herbal' by
the Breton poet Guillevic - lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle
briefly over the world of things which excludes human speech, while
affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a
self-sufficiency in which we too are included. Human Chain is Seamus
Heaney's twelfth collection of poems.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland.
Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966
and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations -
including Beowulf (1999) - which have established him as one of the
leading poets now at work. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature. District and Circle (2006) was awarded the T. S. Eliot
Prize in 2006. Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by
Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David
Cohen Prize for Literature.
