Human Chain (edition 2010)

“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.

I love this opening to the latest collection of the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Human Chain. These are verses imbued with the memories that have often been the subject and inspiration for his poetry, yet they feel differently than those of his younger self. Viewed now through the losses brought by age, infirmity and death, these reflections are clearly the venue of the older poet.

Heaney uses a deceptively simple language and form that seems a suitable testament to the everyday nature of his subjects, presented in concrete, concise and often masculine imagery. He shares moments that are both foreign to me in their representation of rural Irish life of an earlier age, while still feeling strongly familiar in their universality. I am not qualified to critique poetry, much less that of a Nobel Laureate. So there is nothing I can better do than to let the words speak for themselves.

“Album” witnesses, through the memories of childhood, the strength and partnership of his parents: “Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation / About a love that’s proved by steady gazing / Not at each other but in the same direction (10-12).”

In “The Butts”, memories of the changing relationship between an elderly father and his son are revisited:
And we must learn to reach well in beneath
Each meager armpit
To lift and sponge him,
…………………………………………….. ​
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working. (25-27, 31-33)

In “Uncoupled”, the foreshadowing of a father’s death: “Shouting among themselves, and now to him / So that his eyes leave mine and I know / The pain of loss before I know the term (22-24).”

Others are written in memory of friends lost. From “The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark”: “The door was open and the house was dark / Wherefore I called his name, although I knew / The answer this time would be silence (1-3).”

A powerful and highly recommended collection. ( )

This book is about beauty, fragility and the very thereness of things. The poems remind one of what it is to be alive. ( )

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. ( )

Seamus Heaney's latest is, overall, a mixed bag.

The usual, stereotypical Heaney subjects are present: childhood in Northern Ireland, memorials of people long gone (often due to sectarian violence), the Irish landscape, but all these come across as a bit perfunctory. There's nothing new in them, no great up-swelling of feeling that wasn't there before, that perhaps wasn't expressed more movingly or eloquently.

The volume only really hits its stride when he moves on to eulogizing the more recently departed, to his own advancing age and his recent-ish stroke. Then the emotion breaks through: sad, weary, even tired, but all the same with a greater feeling of authenticity. ( )