Human Chain
Poems

Human Chain: Poems by Seamus Heaney (Hardback) (ISBN: 9780571269228)

Seamus Heaney's thirteenth 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 101' 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.

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. District and Circle, his eleventh collection of poems, was published in 2006 and was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize

 

ISBN	571269222
ISBN13	9780571269228
Publisher	Faber and Faber
Format	Hardback
Publication date	02/09/2010
Pages	96
Weight (grammes)	255
Published in	United Kingdom
Height (mm)	222
Width (mm)	145

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. District and Circle, his eleventh collection of poems, was published in 2006 and was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize.