Human Chain

There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyric, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other 'hermits songs' which weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar.

A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 110" 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 the poet's first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead - friends, neighbours, family - which is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. "Human Chain" also adapts a poetic 'herbal' by the Breton poet Guillevic - lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things which excludes human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.

"Human Chain" is Seamus Heaney's twelfth collection of poems.

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Details

SKU SKU9043

ISBN Number 9780571269228

Author Seanus Heamey

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