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Human Chain
《人之链》是诺贝尔文学奖得主希尼的最后一本诗集，出版于2010年，获得2011年《波士顿环球报》年度最佳诗集（A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011）、格里芬诗歌奖（Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize）和现代诗歌奖（Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award）。诗集立足于诗人晚年，深入过去找回经历中的每一次启示和证明。其核心是一个不断扩展的形象: 人与人拉起手站在一起，逐渐连成一片，跨越时空蔓延而去。这 里有关于亲情和友爱的伦理，有劳动者之间的互助协作，对转世重生的冥想，有对家人亡魂的拥抱，有神秘之光幽微的闪烁，也有对新生儿好奇的凝视。这些形象以各种方式勾连、映射、互衬，在回忆之光中结合成为一个整体的象征，代表一个完整而有机的世界。诗人这些晚年的作品，拥有一种平静的光亮，就像夏天的夜晚没有黑暗下去，而是变得越来越晴朗。
85 pages, Hardcover
First published September 2, 2010
69 people are currently reading
1510 people want to read
About the author
Seamus Heaney
380 books1,085 followersWorks of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections
Wintering Out
(1972) and
Field Work
(1979) as well as a translation of
Beowulf
(1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 170 reviews
June 15, 2019
A sparse, supple collection of poems that each capture something singular and striking about human connections. The standouts to me were Human Chain, Route 110, "Had I not been awake," and "The door was open and the house was dark," the latter of which I'll copy here because I think it captures what's so elegant and perceptive about Heaney's style:
The door was open and the house was dark
in memory of David Hammond
The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence
That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I’d entered (I remember now)
The streetlamps too were out
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight
Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar
Or an overgrown airfield in high summer.
The door was open and the house was dark
in memory of David Hammond
The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence
That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I’d entered (I remember now)
The streetlamps too were out
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight
Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar
Or an overgrown airfield in high summer.
September 23, 2016
I found this book hidden in my filing cabinet in school today, and remembered that I had taught the title poem last year to explain how context matters to understand a situation. What a nice Friday afternoon surprise to discover it again (and restore it for my private library). It is a noble Nobel representative for poetry, and also a very good book to read on packed commuter trains! It makes you feel less irritable, as the atmosphere enhances the poetry.
I love the title poem, Human Chain! However, I expected something completely different when I began. Human Chain immediately made me think of prisons, injustice, the hardship of the human condition. And you can read all that into the poem. It is implicit, but the chain in the poem is the human reaction to that hardship, a positive chain of helpers, heaving sacks of food onto a truck. The relief when you let go of one sack is brilliantly described, and makes you think of Camus' Sisiphos and his alleged happiness at the top of the mountain, when he lets go of the boulder and starts to walk down again. Knowing why you do what you do is a main source of pleasure, even if the external circumstances are less than optimal. Beautiful poetry!
I wonder if my students still remember it? As far as I recall, I bombarded them with Heaney, Szymborska and Kipling, and talk about justice and politics expressed in poetry and art. I do think I remember laughing when one student interpreted Human Chain as teenage school experience, that you throw off each night with a sigh of relief, just to pick it up again next morning. Aren't they brilliant, my adolescents?
I love the title poem, Human Chain! However, I expected something completely different when I began. Human Chain immediately made me think of prisons, injustice, the hardship of the human condition. And you can read all that into the poem. It is implicit, but the chain in the poem is the human reaction to that hardship, a positive chain of helpers, heaving sacks of food onto a truck. The relief when you let go of one sack is brilliantly described, and makes you think of Camus' Sisiphos and his alleged happiness at the top of the mountain, when he lets go of the boulder and starts to walk down again. Knowing why you do what you do is a main source of pleasure, even if the external circumstances are less than optimal. Beautiful poetry!
I wonder if my students still remember it? As far as I recall, I bombarded them with Heaney, Szymborska and Kipling, and talk about justice and politics expressed in poetry and art. I do think I remember laughing when one student interpreted Human Chain as teenage school experience, that you throw off each night with a sigh of relief, just to pick it up again next morning. Aren't they brilliant, my adolescents?
April 18, 2021
Written after he suffered a stroke, the poems in this collection are laced with the nostalgia and grief of a writer who is struggling to come to terms with not only his own mortality but that of the other people in his life. The unrelenting passage of time and what that wreaks and bestows on the human is omnipresent.
In the Attic
IV.
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the lightheadedness
Of a cabin boy's first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It's not that I can't imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.'
My next book: Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk vol. 11
In the Attic
IV.
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the lightheadedness
Of a cabin boy's first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It's not that I can't imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.'
My next book: Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk vol. 11
February 4, 2025
Es el primer libro que leo de Seamus Heaney, tengo otro más esperando en mi librero. Necesito leerlo más para definir que pienso y siento con su poesía.
September 24, 2017
The linking of life runs throughout this collection of poems; the chain of humanity identified and the individuals longing to be a link in that chain is forged through the beautiful poems in this collection.
November 7, 2023
138th book of 2023.
I'm a big fan of Heaney but this collection is mostly filled with misses. I like to read poetry aloud but by halfway, I didn't even have the heart to do that. I've spread them out over a few days, but none of them will have lasting impressions on me. Conversely, some of the lines from Death of a Naturalist still resurface in my mind at random intervals.
I'm a big fan of Heaney but this collection is mostly filled with misses. I like to read poetry aloud but by halfway, I didn't even have the heart to do that. I've spread them out over a few days, but none of them will have lasting impressions on me. Conversely, some of the lines from Death of a Naturalist still resurface in my mind at random intervals.
August 21, 2015
I very much enjoyed reading Heaney's descriptions which led me to images which brought up emotions. (No, this isn't a philosophical discussion of language.). Most of the poems in this book worked extremely well for me in this sense.
Unfortunately, or not, I can't go into detail because the book has utterly disappeared. It is somewhere in this room, lost in a pile perhaps, continuing to put forth its images to no one.
Unfortunately, or not, I can't go into detail because the book has utterly disappeared. It is somewhere in this room, lost in a pile perhaps, continuing to put forth its images to no one.
November 29, 2011
Seamus Heaney's human chain is busy with the connections of family relationships and acquaintances reaching into the past, alive with the tingle personal recollection gives them. These are poems about the chain of being and about how we're all linked. Almost all of them recall a family member or someone Heaney has known. Frequently they're identified by name. These poems aren't particularly lyrical, and that, plus the reader's unfamiliarity with the poet's personal association, lends them an extra measure of obscurity. But still some resonate with power. A long poem called "Route 110," evokes with its mention of Lake Avernus and lines about shades and shadows the journey of Dante and Virgil. But Heaney can be brighter, too. In the last poem, "A Kite for Aibhin," he leaves the reader lightheaded with an image of a kite bobbing in the wind, a celebration of the individual grown into independence, lifted free of family.
December 22, 2010
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.
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.
April 29, 2021
Just exquisite. Just lovely. Poems about lost family and mortality, made more poignant by Heaney's recent death, so that the fore-shadowing bites harder. Lots of Irish Gaelic, echoes of the language of his homeland, but such music!
December 6, 2023
Had I not been awake I would have missed it
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore.
p2
Seamus Heaney, Nobel prizewinner, is undoubtedly a master poet. His immersion in the natural world gives a sensual immediacy to weather. His keen eye and melancholic heart allow him somehow to capture a vivid demarcation between reflective bright and absorbent dark.
This pantheist impulse, with its "congregation of leaves" flows through all the poems, the pulse of life throughout its cycles.
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
from the poem A Herbal p35
Alas, as thrilling as this may be, SH does prove challenging to follow as he winds his poetry through the particular chronology of his semi-mythic Irish past. In other words, my ignorance prevented me from appreciating many of the poems that extolled persons and deeds.
Not the ideal reader then, I am yet intrigued enough to be ready for more.
3.5 rounded up for GR
5/7
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore.
p2
Seamus Heaney, Nobel prizewinner, is undoubtedly a master poet. His immersion in the natural world gives a sensual immediacy to weather. His keen eye and melancholic heart allow him somehow to capture a vivid demarcation between reflective bright and absorbent dark.
This pantheist impulse, with its "congregation of leaves" flows through all the poems, the pulse of life throughout its cycles.
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
from the poem A Herbal p35
Alas, as thrilling as this may be, SH does prove challenging to follow as he winds his poetry through the particular chronology of his semi-mythic Irish past. In other words, my ignorance prevented me from appreciating many of the poems that extolled persons and deeds.
Not the ideal reader then, I am yet intrigued enough to be ready for more.
3.5 rounded up for GR
5/7
October 4, 2021
’Between languages, half in thrall to desire,
Half shy of it, when a flit of the foreknown
Blinked off a sunlit lake near the horizon
And passed into us, climbing and clunking up
Those fretted metal steps, as we reboarded
And were reincarnated seat by seat.’
Not quite sure why this didn’t work for me. The only one that held my attention enough is the one I’ve shared an excerpt of above. ‘Parking Lot’ is the title of the poem – and I quite like the soft, quiet and somewhat endearing mood/landscape that Heaney had put together. I found myself skimming through most of the poems. I wouldn’t dare say that they were badly composed, but simply wasn’t my cup of tea; simply didn’t find them interesting enough. I thought I’d like it since I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his other poetry collections – North and Opened Ground: Poems, 1966-1996. Oh well, can’t like them all I suppose.
November 8, 2010
I am awe-struck in the presence of such great poetry written by such a masterful wielder of words. The literal and figurative chains in this book are multifarious: metal links, plant fibers, threaded stitches, hands held in other hands, the living lifting the dying, work assembly lines, pens & pencils, hyphenated word-loads, languages joined through translation, loops of recorded sound ... As well as personal life enacted, remembered, forgotten, exhumed, re-imagined ... As well as books themselves, artifacts made from chains of animal-vegetable-mineral matter: paper and dyes from plants, pens and printing presses from metals, leather bindings from animal hides, poetry from human beings. The poignancy is that Mr. Heaney's book-object comes into my hands at the same historical moment that e-readers like Kindle and Nook do, and that the human links he memorializes are nowadays being overpowered by hyperlinks. Biology or bionic? Even the ambiguous photograph on the jacket cover of this fine book -- human nerve? plant vein? digital circuitry? -- is caught, tense, in the middle.
October 11, 2021
Somehow, when I went to the mobile app for this, it deleted my entire review. Sad times.
I like his poems on death the most.
The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark
in memory of David Hammond
The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence
That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I'd entered (I remember now)
The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight
Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar
On an overgrown airfield in late summer.
*I have since memorized this one, and it ranks as one of my all-time favorite poems. Perhaps my favorite eulogy. I wish I still had my thoughts from the first time I read it, but they have been swiped away. Perhaps that's appropriate for such a book as this.
I like his poems on death the most.
The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark
in memory of David Hammond
The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence
That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I'd entered (I remember now)
The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight
Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar
On an overgrown airfield in late summer.
*I have since memorized this one, and it ranks as one of my all-time favorite poems. Perhaps my favorite eulogy. I wish I still had my thoughts from the first time I read it, but they have been swiped away. Perhaps that's appropriate for such a book as this.
October 10, 2015
Though I'd probably put it a rank below his very best work, I have no hesitation in saying that I enjoyed 'Human Chain' more than any Heaney collection since 'The Haw Lantern'. Typically layered, richly allusive and ripe with snatched memories, held connections and a deep sense of mortality, it's a beautiful closing chapter to what has been a magnificent story. Reading these poems aloud - a few of which surely stand with the finest he's written - they seem to move the air, and his relentlessly right word choices not only impress but inspire. I love the placing, too, of his wonderful and very moving poem, 'In the Attic', in the penultimate spot, because since closing the book I've gone back and read it over and over again, drawing me back in.
March 15, 2016
Highlights: Miracle, The Wood Road, Derry Derry Down, Slack, Death of a Painter, The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark
August 30, 2019
I have been recommended poetry by various people over the years and one name that keeps being mentioned is Seamus Heaney. Shamefully I had never read any of his at all. Thankfully my local library had a copy of Human Chain and unusually I had space on my card, so I grabbed a copy.
This the first of his collections that I have read and from what I can gather is the last collection that he was well enough to have full editorial control over. Just the title is quite chilling, as it made me think of the oppressed, but the context here is the people that helped carry him to get medical care after he had had a stroke. Heaney also concerns himself with the loss of friends and family as time grinds on. The prose is warm and nostalgic at times and then can feel disjointed and unsettling at other moments.
Everywhere plants
Flourish among the graves,
Sinking in their roots
In all the dynasties
Of the dead
I wasn’t totally sure what to expect with this collection and it was not the easiest read to be honest given that it is about those that are in the autumn of their lives. It is pretty melancholic reading, but there were the odd glittering lines in amongst the poems. I have also got a couple of his other collections to read, including Opened Ground.
Three Favourite Poems
Album
The Wool Road
Slack
This the first of his collections that I have read and from what I can gather is the last collection that he was well enough to have full editorial control over. Just the title is quite chilling, as it made me think of the oppressed, but the context here is the people that helped carry him to get medical care after he had had a stroke. Heaney also concerns himself with the loss of friends and family as time grinds on. The prose is warm and nostalgic at times and then can feel disjointed and unsettling at other moments.
Everywhere plants
Flourish among the graves,
Sinking in their roots
In all the dynasties
Of the dead
I wasn’t totally sure what to expect with this collection and it was not the easiest read to be honest given that it is about those that are in the autumn of their lives. It is pretty melancholic reading, but there were the odd glittering lines in amongst the poems. I have also got a couple of his other collections to read, including Opened Ground.
Three Favourite Poems
Album
The Wool Road
Slack
November 30, 2010
I should tell you that I ran across Seamus Heaney in my 20s in the late seventies when I was living in Los Angeles. I discovered a poem published in a mainstream woman's magazine about 'the troubles'. I fell in love with his poetic voice instantly. I suppose it would not be an exaggeration to say, I very firmly placed him upon a lofty pedestal.
This latest book of poetry has the same mastery of language, the same lyrical quality, but it made me quite sad. I feel older after having read these poems. Or, perhaps I feel older anyway.
To me this collection describes so very well all the beauty, poetry and despair of growing old. In the time it takes us to read these poems we are reminded to take the time to remember our own lives, loves, losses while we still can...
I told you it saddened me.
It is a beautiful collection. You owe it to yourself to read it.
This latest book of poetry has the same mastery of language, the same lyrical quality, but it made me quite sad. I feel older after having read these poems. Or, perhaps I feel older anyway.
To me this collection describes so very well all the beauty, poetry and despair of growing old. In the time it takes us to read these poems we are reminded to take the time to remember our own lives, loves, losses while we still can...
I told you it saddened me.
It is a beautiful collection. You owe it to yourself to read it.
March 6, 2021
A sad day in Ireland and other parts of the globe where poetry thrives when Seamus Heaney died. He is a master of immediacy, of enabling the reader to see and feel and hear and taste. In Human Chain, Heaney is in the shadow of a stroke he endured, an intimation of mortality that got him musing about a fading past and a diminishing future. This is how "In the Attic" ends:
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness
Of a cabin boy's first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It's not that I can't imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness
Of a cabin boy's first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It's not that I can't imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
August 5, 2013
Heaney always gives a lot in his bracing, spare and language-rich lines, and this collection, an earthy and yet somehow tender encounter with mortality, is no different. But I found this collection's second half stronger than its first, except for the opening short and dramatic "Had I not been awake." For me the best in the collection -- and in some ways Heaney at his best -- were "Slack," "A Herbal," "Route 110," "Wraiths" and "In the Attic," while "Hermit Songs" and its breathtaking, beautiful and taut reinvention of the history of writing and the poet's calling is a masterpiece.
November 15, 2015
I picked this up in the library and read it in one sitting. The preface was intriguing and many of the poems are written in memory of someone, often listed at the beginning of the poem in lower case italics, i.m; Name in an understated, unobtrusive way, as to make them this collection, which seems deeply personal and evocative, almost as if it were the collection of things you said you'd get around to one day, and then here they are, the memory of those people who now no longer are, but traces of them remain in memory.
January 2, 2018
Some marvelous poems in this his last collection. Immensely sad, direct. and full of recollection and light memories. Delightful music and word play as he recalls friends now gone. He is is equally non-sparing about himself as he writes about his ambulance ride to the hospital after his stroke. Among other lines that we older readers will not forget, until we do, 'As the memorable bottoms out / Into the irretrievable.'
His wide cultural references are wonderful in broadening otherwise very personal poems.
His wide cultural references are wonderful in broadening otherwise very personal poems.
May 10, 2011
I didn't think I'd ever say this about a collection of Heaney poems, but: meh.
June 13, 2023
Some favorites: Colum Cille Cecinit, Hermit Songs, Human Chain, 'Had I not been awake', and The Riverbank Field.
Above the ruled quires of my book
I hear the wild birds jubilant.
Above the ruled quires of my book
I hear the wild birds jubilant.
February 9, 2025
Heaney's writing seems simple, but flows deeply through the reading experience.
June 1, 2017
A late collection with Virgilian undertones, particularly Book VI, which he seems to have been working on or pondering during much of the period of composition of this collection. Images of Aeneas' descent to the underworld pop up in unexpected places. His attempt to embrace the shade of his father Anchises is inserted into a reverie about saying goodbye to one of his own relatives on the threshold of life, health and sickness, death. The same nostalgic sense of futility and resignation (that accompanies aging) pervades.
In one poem, a man in the twilight of life owns up to the fact that "he could bear no longer to watch // the sun going down / and asking please to be put / with his back to the window" ("The Baler").
In another he expresses the sense that our bodies are mere vessels of skin that our souls wear ("Eelworks").
When Virgil's Aeneas sees souls being prepared in the river Lethe for reincarnation, he wonders who in their right minds would want to return to the land of the living and have to do it all again. Verses from this passage actually appear here in their original Latin in "The Riverbank Field."
In his posthumously published translation of Aeneid Book VI, Heaney renders this moment beautifully: "'Are we to believe then, father, there are souls / who rise from here to the sky of the upper world / and re-enter the sluggish drag of the body? / What possesses the poor souls? Why this mad desire / to get back to the light?'" (vv. 970-76). "Tarda corpora" becomes "the sluggish drag of the body." Aeneas is none to found of this thing called life, poor soul.
In an homage to another poet, he expresses his sense of having lived: "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" ("A Herbal").
Dantesque tercets permeate the collection. Without the rhyme. And even a reference or two to Dante's coopting of Virgil's afterlife is coopted in turn to his own uses in a memorable image: "Gathering, quietening, / stepping on to the grass, stopping and holding hands. / Earth was replaying its tapes, // Words being given new airs: / Dante's whispering wood – / the wood of the suicides – / had been magicked to lovers' lane" ("Canopy").
"So this is what an afterlife can come to? / A cloud-boil of grey weather on the wall / Like murky crystal, a remembered stare – // This for an answer to Alighieri / and Plato's Er? Who watched immortal souls / choose lives to come according as they were // Fulfilled or repelled by existences they'd known / Or suffered first time around. Saw great far-seeing / Odysseus in the end choose for himself // The destiny of a private man. Saw Orpheus / because he'd perished at the woman's hands / choose rebirth as a swan" ("Longhanure").
And closes with the image of a kite flying off, like a life, once the string breaks and the human chain is broken.
In one poem, a man in the twilight of life owns up to the fact that "he could bear no longer to watch // the sun going down / and asking please to be put / with his back to the window" ("The Baler").
In another he expresses the sense that our bodies are mere vessels of skin that our souls wear ("Eelworks").
When Virgil's Aeneas sees souls being prepared in the river Lethe for reincarnation, he wonders who in their right minds would want to return to the land of the living and have to do it all again. Verses from this passage actually appear here in their original Latin in "The Riverbank Field."
In his posthumously published translation of Aeneid Book VI, Heaney renders this moment beautifully: "'Are we to believe then, father, there are souls / who rise from here to the sky of the upper world / and re-enter the sluggish drag of the body? / What possesses the poor souls? Why this mad desire / to get back to the light?'" (vv. 970-76). "Tarda corpora" becomes "the sluggish drag of the body." Aeneas is none to found of this thing called life, poor soul.
In an homage to another poet, he expresses his sense of having lived: "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" ("A Herbal").
Dantesque tercets permeate the collection. Without the rhyme. And even a reference or two to Dante's coopting of Virgil's afterlife is coopted in turn to his own uses in a memorable image: "Gathering, quietening, / stepping on to the grass, stopping and holding hands. / Earth was replaying its tapes, // Words being given new airs: / Dante's whispering wood – / the wood of the suicides – / had been magicked to lovers' lane" ("Canopy").
"So this is what an afterlife can come to? / A cloud-boil of grey weather on the wall / Like murky crystal, a remembered stare – // This for an answer to Alighieri / and Plato's Er? Who watched immortal souls / choose lives to come according as they were // Fulfilled or repelled by existences they'd known / Or suffered first time around. Saw great far-seeing / Odysseus in the end choose for himself // The destiny of a private man. Saw Orpheus / because he'd perished at the woman's hands / choose rebirth as a swan" ("Longhanure").
And closes with the image of a kite flying off, like a life, once the string breaks and the human chain is broken.
February 18, 2013
I love the way Heaney uses simple language and makes it sing, and he does that here as well as he does it anywhere. His words carry tremendous authority and power. The book is so readable, but the poetry doesn't feel light. If I have one critique, it's that I wish he was a little less referential. So often, Dante or Virgil or someone will appear, and though I know this is true to Heaney's life and experience, I can't help but feel it becomes a way of propping the poems up with genius, but there's so much genius here already, they don't need any propping. Heaney's voice and his experience and the Irish landscape, both ecological and political, are more than enough. Maybe, though, he explains his reasoning here:
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.
I suppose there are some who will say that another Heaney collection is better and brighter, and they may be right. I am a lover, rather than a scholar, of his work. His faith in human connections is refreshing in an era of misanthropy and cynicism. (I don't know if he's directly replying to Roth's Human Stain in this title choice, but I like to imagine he is.) Coming out of a country whose violent history more than merits a darker view, Heaney's celebration of humanity is not naive but hard won and deeply felt. I admire the poems in this collection best where he allows that faith to surface amongst all its troubling antipathies.
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.
I suppose there are some who will say that another Heaney collection is better and brighter, and they may be right. I am a lover, rather than a scholar, of his work. His faith in human connections is refreshing in an era of misanthropy and cynicism. (I don't know if he's directly replying to Roth's Human Stain in this title choice, but I like to imagine he is.) Coming out of a country whose violent history more than merits a darker view, Heaney's celebration of humanity is not naive but hard won and deeply felt. I admire the poems in this collection best where he allows that faith to surface amongst all its troubling antipathies.
January 4, 2015
Human Chain, by Seamus Heaney, 2010. This book from Heaney, a truly great poet, is his last book of poems. Some of the first poems in it – “Had I not been awake”, “Album”, and “Uncoupled”, are alive with Heaney-esque images and insights. Each time I’ve read the first of these, I have gotten more out of it. But many of the poems are so filled with personal references (people he knew, place names) and literary references in four languages that it’s a struggle to get Heaney’s meaning from them. I found this to be much more true in these poems than in others of Heaney’s I’ve read, though it’s a mark of his excellence that he always makes you search and stretch. Still worth it? – of course, by a long shot. And I’m sure re-reading will yield more, just as it did for “Had I not been awake”. As I said in the inscription I wrote for my son Nick (a Christmas gift this year) “his writing endures as a great gift to humankind.”
“Had I not been awake”
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence;
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.
“Had I not been awake”
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence;
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.
November 7, 2016
There are a few contemporary Poets that I'm fairly familiar with and have great affection for: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dana Gioia, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney. I find each of them radically different. Ferlinghetti's combination of high modernism and Beat sensibility, Gioia's new formalism, Collins's playfulness and humor, and finally Heaney's remarkable, remarkable voice. Of all of them, Heaney makes language sing. This collection isn't the best collection of his work I've read, but it was, as it always is poetry that I know should be read slowly, savored, lingered over, and at the same time is always poetry that I cannot help devouring, plunging through, unable to wade in slowly, drawn ineluctably forward word by word, line by line, verse by verse, until suddenly, I'm at the end of the volume.
April 28, 2011
I'd give this a 2.5.
The language is beautiful and enjoyable, but the only reason I don't give this a higher rating is because of myself--I don't understand a lot of the Irish and Celtic references or words, so it pulls me out of the flow of the otherwise quite beautiful poetry.
The language is beautiful and enjoyable, but the only reason I don't give this a higher rating is because of myself--I don't understand a lot of the Irish and Celtic references or words, so it pulls me out of the flow of the otherwise quite beautiful poetry.
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