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Human Chain: Poems by Seamus Heaney (Excerpt)

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 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. http://www.fsgpoetry.com/ Excerpted from HUMAN CHAIN: Poems by Seamus Heaney. Published in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by Seamus Heaney. All rights reserved.

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Seamus Heaney
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7K views6 pages

Human Chain: Poems by Seamus Heaney (Excerpt)

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 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. http://www.fsgpoetry.com/ Excerpted from HUMAN CHAIN: Poems by Seamus Heaney. Published in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by Seamus Heaney. All rights reserved.

Written by

Seamus Heaney
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

“ HAD I NOT B EE N AWA KE”

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.

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HU MAN C HAI N

FO R T ER ENC E BR OWN

Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand


In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again

With a grip on two sack corners,


Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave—

The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing


On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed

That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,


A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.

17

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IN T H E ATT I C

Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the cross-trees


Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out


Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals—
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead


Appears to rise again . . . “But he was dead enough,”
The story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

ii

A birch tree planted twenty years ago


Comes between the Irish Sea and me
At the attic skylight, a man marooned

In his own loft, a boy


Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,
Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

82

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By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,
Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most
Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

iii

Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma


Of hallway linoleum, Grandfather now appears,
His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen

They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier


For the matinee I’ve just come back from.
“And Isaac Hands,” he asks. “Was Isaac in it?”

His memory of the name a-waver too,


His mistake perpetual, once and for all,
Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

iv

As I age and blank on names,


As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the lightheadedness

83

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Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still


That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

84

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