Human Chain is the twelfth and final poetry collection by Seamus Heaney. It was first published in 2010 by the Faber and Faber.[1]
Contents
"Had I not been awake"
Album
The Conway Stewart
Uncoupled
The Butts
Chanson d'Aventure
Miracle
Human Chain
A Mite-Box
An Old Refrain
The Wood Road
The Baler
Derry Derry Down
Eelworks
Slack
A Herbal
Canopy
The Riverbank Field
Route 110
Death of a Painter
Loughanure
Wraiths
Sweeney Out-takes
Colum Cille Cecinit
Hermit Songs
"Lick the pencil"
"The door was open and the house was dark"
In the Attic
A Kite for Aibhín
Reception
Colm Tóibín of The Guardian called it Heaney's "best single volume for many years" and "one that contains some of the best poems he has written". He further writes "Heaney allows this struggle between the lacrimae rerum and the consolations of poetry to have a force which is satisfying because its result is so tentative and uncertain. Memory here can be filled with tones of regret and even undertones of anguish, but it also can appear with a sense of hard-won wonder. There is an active urge to capture the living breath of things, but he also allows sorrow into his poems."[2]Kate Kellaway of The Observer wrote "Human Chain is about inheritance – in the fullest sense of the word. If it were a poet such as Philip Larkin writing, human chain would mean "man hands on misery to man". But what makes Seamus Heaney's writing so fortifying is, partly, his temperament: his human chain is tolerant, durable, compassionate and every link is reinforced by literature."
[3] Luke Smith of The Oxonian Review wrote, "Heaney is now 71, and Human Chain is his first book since the stroke. It should not surprise us, then, that the poems here concern themselves with mortality, itself so finely expressed in the title poem, where the comparison is drawn to the moment of release in slinging sacks of grain onto a trailer."[4]
Poet William Logan, in his review for The New York Times Book Review, wrote "'Human Chain' is far from Heaney's best book — the short and short-winded sequences rarely smolder like a peat bog afire underground. He's still good at the character sketches from the Irish hinterlands, the deft evocations of common objects (the evidence of the ordinary bewitches him), the elegies and funerals that increasingly have dominated his work. Troubled by the losses memory is heir to, most moving on his father's decline and death, the poems are evocations of a life now past."[5] Irish Poet Eamon Grennan in his review for The Irish Times, wrote "As always, of course, it's his [Heaney] language, as it translates the world into a world of words, that is a continuous instruction and delight, its colloquial ease given heft by its unabashed rootedness in the eloquence of literature – which is here, as it has always been, a field he paces with the same alert poise with which he might scan the intimate acres of Bellaghy or Glanmore."[6]
^Logan, William (24 September 2010). "Ply the Pen". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 22 March 2023. Retrieved 11 November 2023 – via NYTimes.com.
