Human Chain: Poems [Hardcover]

Seamus Heaney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2010

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011

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

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nostalgia and memory, numinous visions and the earthy music of compound adjectives together control the short poems and sequences of the Irish Nobel laureate's 14th collection of verse, a work of familiar strengths and unparalleled charm. Old teachers, schoolmates, farmhands, and even the employees of an œEelworks  arrive transfigured through Heaney's command of sound: a schoolmate whose family worked in the eel trade œwould ease his lapped wrist// From the flap-mouthed cuff/ Of a jerkin rank with eel oil,// The abounding reek of it/ Among our summer desks.  The title poem applies Heaney's gift for physical mimesis to an image from the day's news: œbags of meal passed hand to hand... by the aid workers  remind the poet of the grain-sacks he swung and dragged in his own youth. Other pages remember, and praise, libraries and classrooms--from grade school, from Harvard, and from medieval Irish monasteries, with their œriddle-solving anchorites.  For all the variety of Heaney's framed glimpses, though, the standout poems grow from occasions neither trivial nor topical: Heaney in 2006 had a minor stroke, and the discreet analogies and glimpsed moments in poems such as œChanson d'Aventure  (about a ride in an ambulance) and œIn the Attic  ( œAs I age and blank on names ) bring his characteristic warmth and subtlety to mortality, rehabilitation, recent trauma, and old age.
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From Booklist

Nobel laureate Heaney is an earthy and mythic poet who channels the music and suffering of Ireland and, beyond that, the spiral of cultivation and destruction that sustains and endangers humankind. These are loamy, time-saturated poems, at once humble and exalted, taproots reaching into the underworld, flowers opening to the sun. Heaney writes of summer frolicking, hay baling, the death of a child, a hunger striker, berries, eels, and coal. Fluent in the classics, Heaney offers a redolent variation on the Aeneid titled “Route 110,” in which the world of paved roads and motor vehicles is revealed to be but a thin veneer. “Bread and pencils,” Heaney chants, holding fast to the nurturing, sensuous realm; to stones and plants and old books; to the way poems and stories link a boy to the “glittering reeling chain” that is human history. Just as heavy sacks of grain handed from aid worker to aid worker chart the ceaseless river of disasters and need, of succor and connection. Heaney puts faith in the actual, be it the wind, a kite, or an extended hand. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First US edition. edition (September 14, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374173516
• ISBN-13: 978-0374173517
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #442,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle, straightforward, powerful, December 21, 2010

By 

Amy Henry (Nipomo, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Human Chain: Poems (Hardcover)

I'm not even going to think about calling this a review of Seamus Heaney's latest collection of poems, Human Chain.. It would be incredibly presumptuous on my part to even suggest that I'm going to "evaluate" his work (of course, normally I'm always presumptuous in terms of reviewing!). Instead, I'm going to just relay a few points that I love about this amazing poet, and why you should read him if you haven't already.




For one thing, his writing style is so straightforward and concise. It's not fluffy or ostentatious or full of bizarre allusions that make you feel ignorant for not understanding. Instead, he writes like a reader, with spare words that draw crisp pictures. Yet his poetry does have layers...you can find multiple meanings if you ponder what he says, so they still have depth and are certainly not simplistic at all. In fact, in many ways his simplicity is deceiving.




For example, I recently re-read "Digging", a poem he wrote in 1968 about a man admiring his father's and grandfather's strength as they turned over turf and worked the land in Ireland. He concludes the poem with something along the lines (I'm paraphrasing) that 'I'll have to do the work with my pen'. What initially is a pleasant enough little story (hard work, family, nature) suddenly had a deeper meaning and then, "digging" into it, one could see he was commenting on the struggles of Northern Ireland and showing the violence that was sometimes used to create change in the Republic. He never got pushy or overtly political but you could clearly see that he was sending another message.




So, in reading Human Chain, I was again dazzled by his subtlety. In one poem, "Miracle", he leads the reader into another direction of thought as he reconsiders the Biblical event of Christ healing a lame man:




Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

And carry him in-

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable

And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

To pass, those ones who had known him all along.




Here, he's stepped back from a significant event to expand on its effects to those out of the spotlight, observers on the periphery who are also altered, although less obviously. In "Slack", he writes about the repetitive and mundane nature of storing coal for the fire, and shows what the symbolic heat means for the home:




A sullen pile

But soft to the shovel, accommodating

As the clattering coal was not.

In days when life prepared for rainy days

It lay there, slumped and waiting,

To dampen down and lengthen out...




And those words-

"Bank the fire"-

Every bit as solid as

The cindery skull

Formed when its tarry

Coral cooled.




Here he illustrates the fragile balance of life and death as dependent on the existence of the humble coal; and foreshadows what happens when the coal runs out. In that case, the cold shells of the fire appear as "skulls". So is he talking about just a home fire or the flame of one's heart?





Finally, the most poignant of all is "The Butts", where the narrator describes searching through a wardrobe of old suits. He describes how they "swung heavily like waterweed disturbed" as he checks the pockets and finds them full of old cigarette butts, "nothing but chaff cocoons, a paperiness not known again until the last days came". Colors, sounds, even odors are a part of the poem as he leaves you to wonder why he's looking through the clothing. Hinting, but never direct, one senses that Heaney is describing the search for a proper burial suit. For a father?




Throughout the collection, varying dedications for the poems give the sense that Heaney wants to go on record with his past and make the connections that are implied with the title, Human Chain. When I first looked at the cover, I thought it was of trees branches, maybe birch, threading out to tiny tips. Then I was alerted to a possibly different meaning when I saw a microscopic picture of the human circulatory system-the blood channels that look so similar to branches. In either case, Heaney has shown, again, an amazing grasp of the connections and complexity of the human condition.




(Rec'd from publisher for review: however, receipt does not influence contents of review)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking Stock, June 16, 2011

By 

Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Human Chain: Poems (Hardcover)

If you know Seamus Heaney, this collection, with its gentle surface concealing tense depths, will probably not surprise you. I mean that in the best possible way. Heaney's approach to observation, noting ekphrastic detail that reveals a core of loss and grief, serves him so well because it tells his story while touching our spirits. We treasure existence, as Heaney, because it ends. Consider these lines from "A Herbal":

Between heather and marigold,
Between sphagnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,

As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof,

I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.

This is a man coming to terms. Notice the past tense. Throughout the book, there's a sense of wistfulness, of realization that what now exists cannot be forever, and that all life's good gifts must end. Poems like "Uncoupled," "Canopy," and "Route 110" bespeak a man looking backward across the span of years.

But he's not merely melancholy. There's also an innate maturity. "The Conway Stewart," about a fountain pen, feels like a deliberate reference to "Digging," the first poem in his first collection (and now the first poem in Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996). That one had the false bravado of Heaney holding a pen "snug as a gun." This new poem feels like recognition that such swaggering machismo doesn't date well; now a pen is a pen, and a poet's connection to the world.

And we even get a sense of Heaney looking forward. Verses like "A Miracle" and "Wraiths" feel like a man taking stock of life, not because he sees it ending, but because he still has work to do while he's here. And the closing poem, "A Kite For Aibhín," features a kite cut loose and setting off for the heavens--a metaphor for the poet if I've ever seen one.

Heaney has remained at the top of the poetry game for so long because his introspective honesty, stated well but not prettified, speaks to a universal need. This collection forms the next fork in his artistic path. Established Heaney fans, new readers, and people who just love poetry will find much to like between these covers.

8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AS Clear as the waters of his first published in 1966, and as deep; please read, September 30, 2010

By 

C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Human Chain: Poems (Hardcover)

Even now at this latter time may we discover new poetry worthy of reading, and ever from Seamus Heaney.

Clear and true and deep and multifaceted, fresh each time we read, and remember.

I replay his recorded readings often, his tender and true reading of Walter Raleigh's poem to his son, of so much beauty he read for all time recorded. Here through this rich amazon I acquired his readings of his own poetry and that of others, and hear him gratefully, tearfully, joyfully read his favorites to me, around the firelight.

Here may we also find the insightful commentaries by countless scholars of various schools, including the great and lucid Helen Vendler in Seamus Heaney, to whom he here dedicates a poem, the series Hermit Songs, which begins to conclude, in part ix: "A great one has put faith in 'meaning'/That runs through space like a word/Screaming and protesting, another in/'Poet's imaginings//And memories of love':/Mine for now I put/in steady-handedness maintained/In books against its vanishing./ ( . . .)

Here may we discover the full library of his prose and poetical writings, and interviews, such as the thick tome Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. This amazon generously offers us so much of the work of this great contemporary poet, and we happily receive this abundant harvest, including his several translations of ancient lore, such as Beowulf: A New Verse Translation {Unabridged} {Audio} {Cd} and The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone and The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes.

Now as grandfather, Heaney writes still, a remarkably long and inspiring career for a poet, a stable poet, a family poet, who calls for us to read, to listen, in peace, in compassion, in peace.

Remember the Tollund Man, the great rib cage of the Irish elk, the vengeful croaking frogs who frightened that young naturalist, and read this now, with him, in his great old age.

So many of our artists of his time and age we lost far too soon. Heaney we have ever with us, and we must come to read.

As part of this verily Human Chain.

"Had I not been awake I would have missed it"
and so would we . . .

Remember with this grandfather the memories of his rural youth, the same sights and smells and sounds and images he related then, as he does now, of a coal dust fire banked . . .

Here we find much drawn from ancient Irish lore (including Sweeney revisited), legend and song, as well as various verse from Europe, ancient (the Aeneid and Charon's barge) and middle and new, including Giovannni Pascoli's L'Aquilone, in a last poem entitled a Kite for Aibhin, ending "The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall."

and as with all grandfathers we find here much mourning for his dead, within this great celebration of life, scaffolded with the ever close presence of the fabulous past of legend and of myth.

a rich feast as nourishing as all from this mighty pen and throat.

hear him once more, please.