Human Chain

Human Chain is the twelfth and final poetry collection by Seamus Heaney. It was first published in 2010 by the Faber and Faber. Contents "Had I not been awake" Album The Conway Stewart Uncoupled The Butts Chanson d'Aventure Miracle Human Chain A Mite-Box An Old Refrain The Wood Road The Baler Derry Derry Down Eelworks Slack A Herbal Canopy The Riverbank Field Route 110 Death of a Painter Loughanure Wraiths Sweeney Out-takes Colum Cille Cecinit Hermit Songs "Lick the pencil" "The door was open and the house was dark" In the Attic A Kite for Aibhín Reception Colm Tóibín of The Guardian called it Heaney's "best single volume for many years" and "one that contains some of the best poems he has written". He further writes "Heaney allows this struggle between the lacrimae rerum and the consolations of poetry to have a force which is satisfying because its result is so tentative and uncertain. Memory here can be filled with tones of regret and even undertones of anguish, but it also can appear with a sense of hard-won wonder. There is an active urge to capture the living breath of things, but he also allows sorrow into his poems." Kate Kellaway of The Observer wrote "Human Chain is about inheritance – in the fullest sense of the word. If it were a poet such as Philip Larkin writing, human chain would mean "man hands on misery to man". But what makes Seamus Heaney's writing so fortifying is, partly, his temperament: his human chain is tolerant, durable, compassionate and every link is reinforced by literature." Luke Smith of The Oxonian Review wrote, "Heaney is now 71, and Human Chain is his first book since the stroke. It should not surprise us, then, that the poems here concern themselves with mortality, itself so finely expressed in the title poem, where the comparison is drawn to the moment of release in slinging sacks of grain onto a trailer."