Human Chain
A poetry collection shaped by life after stroke, deepening questions of inheritance, memory, and loss.
Work Information
It records the weight of what is handed down with quiet density.
Human Chain is the collection in which late Heaney layers bodily experience with memory to write about family, the dead, and poetic inheritance. Repeated images of passing and receiving give the poems an unusually tactile clarity.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2012-03-01
- Pages
- 96 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13 x 0.5 x 19.5 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571269242
- ISBN-10
- 0571269249
- Price
- 2648 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
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.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist , his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones , a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain , his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013. His translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI was published posthumously in 2016 to critical acclaim, followed in 2018 by 100 Poems , a selection of poems from his entire career, chosen by his family.
Reviews
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«The full of a white/ enamel bucket /of little pears » : Seamus Heaney offers images that pretend to fix the suspension of time , almost a kind of an every day metaphysics, similar to some old Dutch painters and millions of followers. Together with the usual remembrances of the past ("Album") he paints its music on the page: "It was the month of May/ Trees in Harvard yard/were turning a young green "..." And stood there waiting, watching/needy and ever needier for translation" It is as Heaney would have a double look: from one part he follows the Poetry tradition, with the other he offers sound and sense to his own experience. An example might be "A herbal", where: "Everywhere plants /flourish among graves" "Between heather and marigold/...between forget me not and honeysuckle", make him realize his deepest wish : «I had my existence/ I was there/ Me in place and the place in me"/ Autobiography in Seamus Heaney poetry goes beyond himself. And becomes music of the world, space belonging to everyone and this is perhaps the deepest sense of the human chain, as the title says. And therefore it would be bereable to support the mind's amnesia, the uncertain step of old age, the body's fragility, writing in verse in the great dramatic hurry of the ambulance towards the Hospital :"Chanson d'Aventure": "in the sunlit cold of a Sunday morning ambulance" ("Love's mystery in souls do grow, but yet the body is its book") Old age and illness do not extinguish the vital thrust . The desire to weigh anchor. This might be his problem to day but it is everybody's problem. He is not an introvert like T.S.Eliot. Heaney remembers me of the philosopher Karl Barth, that gives to Mozart music the greatest magnitude, because his YES contains and overcomes the No that also sets place and pervades his life. As Gustav Mahler's work. As a great part of humanity that struggle with this duality. It is the same with poetry: it is a way of reparation, that tries to know how to repair external menaces and interior fears. . . ."You could confess/everything to./Even your fears/ of the night/ of people/ Even. . . " This is beautiful poetry, highly recommended !
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I love everything by Seamus Heaney and this was no different. He was a master. May he rest in peace. This collection is small, similar to North and evokes the interconnectedness that is at the heart of all things Celtic. As an American of Irish descent I loved how it reminded me of our ancestral connections to the past as well as our connections to now. Beautiful - whether your are Irish or not.
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A beautiful edition!
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Can't believe Seamus Heaney is no longer with us. The Human Chain is such a gift. For whatever reason my favorite for the last few days has been "Miracle".
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A fitting last volume of poems by a great poet. As might be expected of a last volume, it makes most sense in the context of his other work.
Related Literary Awards
- Forward Prizes for Poetry Edition 19 (2010) ・Excellence Award