Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

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

Heaney, Seamus: - 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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374173517
ISBN 10	0374173516
Title	Human Chain
Author	Seamus Heaney
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus And Giroux
Year published	2010-09-14
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.