Faber & Faber

Human Chain: Seamus Heaney

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Synopsis:

Seamus Heaney’s twelfth 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 lyric, 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, 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 speechless things and landscapes, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which the human is also included.

 

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Further listening: Seamus Heaney Poetry Prom

Recorded at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk, in August 2010, Seamus Heaney at the Poetry Trust's Poetry Prom - listen here for Heaney in conversation with poet Michael Laskey, a selection of his poems, and audience reaction.

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Tags:

Categorised as:

Poetry

Sub-categories:

Poetry Collections

Places:

Ireland

Genres & Themes:

Families; Folklore; Landscape; Mythology; Recollection

Awards & Prizes:

Forward Best Collection - Winner 2010; T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry - Shortlist 2010