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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466855670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 01/13/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."
Read an Excerpt
Human Chain
By Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2010 Seamus HeaneyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5567-0
CHAPTER 1
"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.
ALBUM
i
Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life
Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse
Of a sawn-down tree, I imagine them
In summer season, as it must have been,
And the place, it dawns on me,
Could have been Grove Hill before the oaks were cut,
Where I'd often stand with them on airy Sundays
Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out
At Magherafelt's four spires in the distance.
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.
ii
Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, Seek ye.
Among green leaves and acorns in mosaic
(Our college arms surmounted by columba,
Dove of the church, of Derry's sainted grove)
The footworn motto stayed indelible:
Seek ye first the Kingdom ... Fair and square
I stood on in the Junior House hallway
A grey eye will look back
Seeing them as a couple, I now see,
For the first time, all the more together
For having had to turn and walk away, as close
In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.
iii
It's winter at the seaside where they've gone
For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,
Uninvited, ineluctable.
A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.
Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.
Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish
And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.
And to all the anniversaries of this
They are not ever going to observe
Or mention even in the years to come.
And now the man who drove them here will drive
Them back, and by evening we'll be home.
iv
Were I to have embraced him anywhere
It would have been on the riverbank
That summer before college, him in his prime,
Me at the time not thinking how he must
Keep coming with me because I'd soon be leaving.
That should have been the first, but it didn't happen.
The second did, at New Ferry one night
When he was very drunk and needed help
To do up trouser buttons. And the third
Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.
v
It took a grandson to do it properly,
To rush him in the armchair
With a snatch raid on his neck,
Proving him thus vulnerable to delight,
Coming as great proofs often come
Of a sudden, one-off, then the steady dawning
Of whatever erat demonstrandum.
Just as a moment back a son's three tries
At an embrace in Elysium
Swam up into my very arms, and in and out
Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom
Verus that has slipped from "very."
THE CONWAY STEWART
"Medium," 14-carat nib,
Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top,
In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin
Pump-action lever
The shopkeeper
Demonstrated,
The nib uncapped,
Treating it to its first deep snorkel
In a newly opened ink-bottle,
Guttery, snottery,
Letting it rest then at an angle
To ingest,
Giving us time
To look together and away
From our parting, due that evening,
To my longhand
"Dear"
To them, next day.
UNCOUPLED
i
Who is this coming to the ash-pit
Walking tall, as if in a procession,
Bearing in front of her a slender pan
Withdrawn just now from underneath
The firebox, weighty, full to the brim
With whitish dust and flakes still sparking hot
That the wind is blowing into her apron bib,
Into her mouth and eyes while she proceeds
Unwavering, keeping her burden horizontal still,
Hands in a tight, sore grip round the metal knob,
Proceeds until we have lost sight of her
Where the worn path turns behind the henhouse.
ii
Who is this, not much higher than the cattle,
Working his way towards me through the pen,
His ashplant in one hand
Lifted and pointing, a stick of keel
In the other, calling to where I'm perched
On top of a shaky gate,
Waving and calling something I cannot hear
With all the lowing and roaring, lorries revving
At the far end of the yard, the dealers
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.
THE BUTTS
His suits hung in the wardrobe, broad
And short
And slightly bandy-sleeved,
Flattened back
Against themselves,
A bit stand-offish.
Stale smoke and oxter-sweat
Came at you in a stirred-up brew
When you reached in,
A whole rake of thornproof and blue serge
Swung heavily
Like waterweed disturbed. I sniffed
Tonic unfreshness,
Then delved past flap and lining
For the forbidden handfuls.
But a kind of empty-handedness
Transpired ... Out of suit-cloth
Pressed against my face,
Out of those layered stuffs
That surged and gave,
Out of the cold smooth pocket-lining
Nothing but chaff cocoons,
A paperiness not known again
Until the last days came
And we must learn to reach well in beneath
Each meagre armpit
To lift and sponge him,
One on either side,
Feeling his lightness,
Having to dab and work
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working.
CHANSON D'AVENTURE
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
i
Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked
In position for the drive,
Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,
The nurse a passenger in front, you ensonced
In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back —
Our postures all the journey still the same,
Everything and nothing spoken,
Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport
Ever like it until then, in the sunlit cold
Of a Sunday morning ambulance
When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne
On love on hold, body and soul apart.
ii
Apart: the very word is like a bell
That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled
In illo tempore in Bellaghy
Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn
As college bellman, the haul of it there still
In the heel of my once capable
Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift
And lag in yours throughout that journey
When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull
And we careered at speed through Dungloe,
Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected
By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.
iii
The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,
His six horses and chariot gone,
His left hand lopped
From a wrist protruding like an open spout,
Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead
Empty as the space where the team should be,
His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own
Doing physio in the corridor, holding up
As if once more I'd found myself in step
Between two shafts, another's hand on mine,
Each slither of the share, each stone it hit
Registered like a pulse in the timbered grips.
MIRACLE
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.
HUMAN CHAIN
FOR TERENCE BROWN
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.
A MITE-BOX
But still in your cupped palm to feel
The chunk and clink of an alms-collecting mite-box,
Full to its slotted lid with copper coins,
Pennies and halfpennies donated for
"The foreign missions" ... Made from a cardboard kit,
Wedge-roofed like a little oratory
And yours to tote as you made the rounds,
Indulged on every doorstep, each donation
Accounted for by a pinprick in a card —
A way for all to see a way to heaven,
The same as when a pinholed camera
Obscura unblinds the sun eclipsed.
AN OLD REFRAIN
i
Robin-run-the-hedge
We called the vetch —
A fading straggle
Of Lincoln green
English stitchwork
Unravelling
With a hey-nonny-no
Along the Wood Road.
Sticky entangling
Berry and thread
Summering in
On the tousled verge.
ii
In seggins
Hear the wind
Among the sedge,
In boortree
The elderberry's
Dank indulgence,
In benweed
Ragwort's
Singular unbending,
In easing
Drips of night rain
From the eaves.
THE WOOD ROAD
Resurfaced, never widened,
The verges grassy as when
Bill Pickering lay with his gun
Under the summer hedge
Nightwatching, in uniform —
Special militiaman.
Moonlight on rifle barrels,
On the windscreen of a van
Roadblocking the road,
The rest of his staunch patrol
In profile, sentry-loyal,
Harassing Mulhollandstown.
Or me in broad daylight
On top of a cartload
Of turf built trig and tight,
Looked up to, looking down,
Allowed the reins like an adult
As the old cart rocked and rollicked.
Then that August day I walked it
To the hunger striker's wake,
Across a silent yard,
In past a watching crowd
To where the guarded corpse
And a guard of honour stared.
Or the stain at the end of the lane
Where the child on her bike was hit
By a speed-merchant from nowhere
Hard-rounding the corner,
A back wheel spinning in sunshine,
A headlamp in smithereens.
Film it in sepia,
Drip-paint it in blood,
The Wood Road as is and was,
Resurfaced, never widened,
The milk-churn deck and the sign
For the bus-stop overgrown.
THE BALER
All day the clunk of a baler
Ongoing, cardiac-dull,
So taken for granted
It was evening before I came to
To what I was hearing
And missing: summer's richest hours
As they had been to begin with,
Fork-lifted, sweated-through
And nearly rewarded enough
By the giddied-up race of a tractor
At the end of the day
Last-lapping a hayfield.
But what I also remembered
As woodpigeons sued at the edge
Of thirty gleaned acres
And I stood inhaling the cool
In a dusk eldorado
Of mighty cylindrical bales
Was Derek Hill's saying,
The last time he sat at our table,
He could bear no longer to watch
The sun going down
And asking please to be put
With his back to the window.
DERRY DERRY DOWN
i
The lush
Sunset blush
On a big ripe
Gooseberry:
I scratched my hand
Reaching in
To gather it
Off the bush,
Unforbidden,
In Annie Devlin's
Overgrown
Back garden.
ii
In the storybook
Back kitchen
Of The Lodge
The full of a white
Enamel bucket
Of little pears:
Still life
On the red tiles
Of that floor.
Sleeping beauty
I came on
By the scullion's door.
EELWORKS
i
To win the hand of the princess
What tasks the youngest son
Had to perform!
For me, the first to come a-courting
In the fish factor's house,
It was to eat with them
An eel supper.
ii
Cut of diesel oil in evening air,
Tractor engines in the clinker-built
Deep-bellied boats,
Landlubbers' craft,
Heavy in water
As a cow down in a drain,
The men straight-backed,
Standing firm
At stern and bow —
Horse-and-cart men, really,
Glad when the adze-dressed keel
Cleaved to the mud.
Rum-and-peppermint men too
At the counter later on
In her father's pub.
iii
That skin Alfie Kirkwood wore
At school, sweaty-lustrous, supple
And bisected into tails
For the tying of itself around itself —
For strength, according to Alfie.
Who would ease his lapped wrist
From the flap-mouthed cuff
Of a jerkin rank with eel oil,
The abounding reek of it
Among our summer desks
My first encounter with the up close
That had to be put up with.
iv
Sweaty-lustrous too
The butt of the freckled
Elderberry shoot
I made a rod of,
A-fluster when I felt
Not tugging but a trailing
On the line, not the utter
Flip-stream frolic-fish
But a foot-long
Slither of a fellow,
A young eel, greasy grey
And rightly wriggle-spined,
Not yet the blueblack
Slick-backed waterwork
I'd live to reckon with,
My old familiar
Pearl-purl
Selkie-streaker.
v
"That tree," said Walter de la Mare
(Summer in his rare, recorded voice
So I could imagine
A lawn beyond French windows
And downs in the middle distance)
"That tree, saw it once
Struck by lightning ... The bark —"
In his accent the ba-aak —
"The bark came off it
Like a girl taking off her petticoat."
White linen éblouissante
In a breath of air,
Sylph-flash made flesh,
Eelwork, sea-salt and dish cloth
Getting a first hold,
Then purchase for the thumbnail
And the thumb
Under a v-nick in the neck,
The skinpeel drawing down
Like silk
At a practised touch.
vi
On the hoarding and the signposts
"Lough Neagh Fishermen's Co-operative,"
But ever on our lips and at the weir
"The eelworks."
SLACK
i
Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal
The lorryman would lug in open bags
And vent into a corner,
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
The fire, a check on mammon
And in its own way
Keeper of the flame.
ii
The sound it made
More to me
Than any allegory.
Slack schlock.
Scuttle scuffle.
Shak-shak.
And those words —
"Bank the fire" —
Every bit as solid as
The cindery skull
Formed when its tarry
Coral cooled.
iii
Out in the rain,
Sent out for it
Again
Stand in the unlit
Coalhouse door
And take in
Its violet blet,
Its wet sand weight,
Remembering it
Tipped and slushed
Catharsis
From the bag.
A HERBAL
AFTER GUILLEVIC'S "HERBIER DE BRETAGNE"
Everywhere plants
Flourish among graves,
Sinking their roots
In all the dynasties
Of the dead.
*
Was graveyard grass
In our place
Any different?
Different from ordinary
Field grass?
Remember how you wanted
The sound recordist
To make a loop,
Wildtrack of your feet
Through the wet
At the foot of a field?
*
Yet for all their lush
Compliant dialect
No way have plants here
Arrived at a settlement.
Not the mare's tail,
Not the broom or whins.
It must have to do
With the wind.
*
Not that the grass itself
Ever rests in peace.
It too takes issue,
Now sets its face
To the wind,
Now turns its back.
*
"See me?" it says.
"The wind
Has me well rehearsed
In the ways of the world.
Unstable is good.
Permission granted!
Go, then, citizen
Of the wind.
Go with the flow."
*
The bracken
Is less boastful.
It closes and curls back
On its secrets,
The best kept
Upon earth.
*
And, to be fair,
There is sun as well.
Nowhere else
Is there sun like here,
Morning sunshine
All day long.
Which is why the plants,
Even the bracken,
Are sometimes tempted
Into trust.
*
On sunlit tarmac,
On memories of the hearse
At walking pace
Between overgrown verges,
The dead here are borne
Towards the future.
*
When the funeral bell tolls
The grass is all a-tremble.
But only then.
Not every time any old bell
Rings.
*
Broom
Is like the disregarded
And company for them,
Shows them
They have to keep going,
That the whole thing's worth
The effort.
And sometimes
Like those same characters
When the weather's very good
Broom sings.
*
Never, in later days,
Would fruit
So taste of earth.
There was slate
In the blackberries,
A slatey sap.
*
Run your hand into
The ditchback growth
And you'd grope roots,
Thick and thin.
But roots of what?
Once, one that we saw
Gave itself away,
The tail of a rat
We killed.
*
We had enemies,
Though why we never knew.
Among them,
Nettles,
Malignant things, letting on
To be asleep.
*
Enemies —
Part of a world
Nobody seemed able to explain
But that had to be
Put up with.
There would always be dock leaves
To cure the vicious stings.
*
There were leaves on the trees
And growth on the headrigs
You could confess
Everything to.
Even your fears
Of the night,
Of people
Even.
*
What was better then
Than to crush a leaf or a herb
Between your palms,
Then wave it slowly, soothingly
Past your mouth and nose
And breathe?
*
If you know a bit
About the universe
It's because you've taken it in
Like that,
Looked as hard
As you look into yourself,
Into the rat hole,
Through the vetch and dock
That mantled it.
Because you've laid your cheek
Against the rush clump
And known soft stone to break
On the quarry floor.
*
Between heather and marigold,
Between sphagnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,
As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof,
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
*
Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases,
Where all is woven into
And of itself, like a nest
Of crosshatched grass blades?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Human Chain by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2010 Seamus Heaney. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
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,