Human Chain

LoveReading Says

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2010.

The Poetry Book Society view...

Human Chain is at once a gathering and a departure. What is being grasped – about connection, about separation – can be neither softened nor solved, a realization as passive and abrupt as “the timed collapse / Of a sawn down tree.” As in earlier work, Heaney uses the fixity of the photograph and the mechanism of film to emphasise the way in which we are the object rather than the subject of certain aspects of our lives. We are always catching ourselves up or out, which is not such a bleak prospect when it brings us moments of intense appreciation: “It was evening before I came to / To what I was hearing /And missing: summer’s richest hours...” (‘The Baler’).

While Human Chain might be seen as a loosening of the hold on the self, Heaney’s engagement with poetry, with life, is more fierce than ever: this book is as much about consolidation as it is about letting go.

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About Human Chain

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.

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