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.
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.
