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Human Chain (2010)

by Seamus Heaney(Favorite Author)

3.91 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0374173516 (ISBN13: 9780374173517)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: 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 stairsIs more and more the light-headednessOf a cabin boy's first time on the rigging,As the memorable bottoms outInto the irretrievable,It's not that I can't imagine stillThat slight untoward rupture and world-tiltAs a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
review 2: Heaney always gives a lot in his bracing, spare and language-rich lines, and thi... mores 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. less

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