Name: Seher Mohsin's review of Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
Item: Human Chain
Rating: 2.5
Author: Seher Mohsin

Seamus Heaney

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 is Seamus Heaney's twelfth collection of poems.

Human Chain

Seher Mohsin

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award 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, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that 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 childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead--friends, neighbors, family--that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic--lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included

Poems

Gavin

As ever, it’s of hands, eels, parents, wakes, digging, kennings, regret, the RUC, Cuchulain, and Caesar. Fully half are in memoriams. You have to be brave or famous to write this plainly. Plainness can be mistaken for absence of technique – ‘here, I could do that’ – but here it is very, very obvious that I could not. Feel your tongue:
 It’s winter at the seaside where they’ve gone
 For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,
 Uninvited, ineluctable.
 A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.
 Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.
 Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish.
 And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.
 And to all the anniversaries of this
 They are not ever going to observe
 Or mention even in the years to come.
 And now the man who drove them here will drive
 Them back, and by evening we’ll be home.


Best are ‘A Herbal’, ‘Chanson d’Aventure’, ‘Miracle’, ‘Loughanure’, and ‘Route 110’, an odyssey about buying a second-hand copy of the Aeneid and then trying to go home.

I feel bad because I loved the cure at Troy, but I haven’t enjoyed the rest of Seamus Heaneys work as much! 

Seher Mohsin &
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Seher Mohsin &Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Seher Mohsin &
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney