Human Chain, Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, 96pp, £12.99 (hardback)

The ecumenical title of Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection is drawn from a line in the title poem of his previous collection District and Circle (2006), a small example of the many similarities that thread the two books together. As readers of Heaney’s dependable work will have come to expect, the tone and tenor of Human Chain offer no substantial departure from the poet’s recent collections.

As expected, the eponymous poem refers to aid work and it comes as no surprise to find that what fascinates the poet most about humanitarian activism is its physically strenuous character: from Death of a Naturalist (1966) onwards, Heaney has offered more than one paean to the meliorative wonders of manual labour (present again this time more prominently in a poem entitled ‘The Baler’), beautifying what one of his favourite poets, Philip Larkin, vilified in his depiction of work as toad-like. Here is an example of Heaney’s slow motion frame-by-frame heightening of a piece of action that is rarely focused on by other poets: ‘The eye-to-eye, onetwo, 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’. The poem ends self-elegiacally, curling its edges back towards the previous poem’s description of the poet himself having been carried out after his heart attack in Donegal, back in 2006.

The notion of the human chain is overtly palpable on a more literary level also in the frequent dedications to men and women of letters: ‘Human Chain’ is addressed to the Irish critic Terence Brown, ‘Hermit Songs’ to the American poetry specialist Helen Vendler and ‘A Herbal’ first appeared in a festschrift for Pierre Joannon, the French historian and founder of Irish studies in France. The Belfast poet Ciaran Carson is also honoured in ‘Wraiths’, despite the fact that his most famous literary assessment of Heaney condemned him as the ‘Laureate of Violence’.

The French connection in this human chain is rather strong, reminding one of the historical ties linking France and Ireland. ‘A Herbal’, the poem for Pierre Joannon, published in Franco-Irish Connections, is also based on a text by the Breton poet Eugène Guillevic. Likewise, the second poem in the collection , ‘Album’, which evokes a series of photographs of Heaney’s parents, alludes to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s definition of marital love: ‘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.’ Still at the heart of the French amorous vein, Heaney’s sixth poem is titled ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ in reference to a Troubadour tradition which has obvious affinities with the Irish Aisling: both genres recount a chance encounter between a wondrous damsel and a spellbound squire in a wild setting. The poem updates the medieval erotic genre in relocating the traditional lovers to the inside of an ambulance, on the day Heaney was taken to hospital. The amorous overtones of this strange, intensely intimate journey come to a point in the pun on the word ‘transport’ which doubles as a synonym for ecstasy (the poem’s epigraph rather eclectically also draws on Donne’s ‘The Ecstasy’): ‘Our postures all the journey still the same,//Everything and nothing spoken,/Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport/Ever like it until then.’

The next section of the poem is also bibliogenetically generated, this time evoking words from a Francophilic English poet known to every pupil. The echoes of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ are given a refreshingly Latino- Anglo-Irish touch: ‘Apart: the very word is like a bell/That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled/In illo tempore in Bellaghy’. This sonorous image (which is an apt correlative for the resonant sound effects of Heaney’s style) is deftly transformed into a conceit by the end of the section when we are told that Heaney’s paralysed arm ‘lay flop-heavy as a bell pull’. There is perhaps also a faint remembrance of Sweeney’s legendary soundrelated curse in this recourse to the bell: the poet’s figurehead hero was incapacitated and then driven mad in battle by the sound of a bell.

Human Chain could feature on a poetry course as a textbook example illustrating Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality: discourse as a mesh of interwoven citations. This practice of seamlessly stringing together quotations from enshrined authors of the past in a surprising new context is also one of the hallmarks of Heaney’s contemporary, the Irish poet Paul Durcan. Other examples of the citational nature of Heaney’s collection include a (perhaps over-risky) reference to D. H. Lawrence’s extraordinary poem ‘Bavarian Gentians’, which confirms Heaney’s neo-romantic affiliation: ‘So reach me not a gentian but stalks/From the bunch that stood in it, each head of oats//A silvered smattering.’ Heaney’s Human Chain resounds with textual echoes from cover to cover: Virgil too features even more prominently than in previous collections.

The notion of the human chain of writers extends to companionship with the ghosts of the ordinary dead in Heaney’s underworld poems: to the same extent as in Heaney’s previous collection, many of the texts in this book reach out a papery hand to the deceased ‘close-packed on Charon’s barge’. None of these new elegies ranks with Heaney’s greatest but one for his father comes close enough: ‘The Butts’ holds its own with what one might call the sartorial elegy (graced by modern examples such as Peter Redgrove’s ‘My Father’s Trapdoors’, Paul Durcan’s ‘On the Floor at the Foot of the Bed’, or Anne Sexton’s ‘The Division of Parts’). In these poems, the elegist comes to terms with loss through contemplation of the loved one’s former clothes, ‘linking objects’ (to use Vamik Volkan’s term for fetishism used in the mourning process) that are paradoxically both a representation of emptiness, absence and substitutive presence all in one. The poem displays Heaney’s gift for similes that give the reader the sensation of being in two places simultaneously, one foot in the wardrobe, the other suddenly deep in Narnia: ‘When you reached in,//A whole rake of thornproof and blue serge/Swung heavily/Like waterweed disturbed’. Heaney has always been adept at heightening tactile sensations: ‘Out of those layered stuffs/That surged and gave,/Out of the cold smooth pocketlining/ Nothing but chaff cocoons,/A paperiness not known again/Until the last days came’.

Like many others in this collection, the poem is written in unrhymed tercets faintly haunted by the barest bones of a ghost of Dantean terza rima. The most objective way to describe the formal properties of Heaney’s poems is probably that they are written in patterned free verse: his stanzas tend to cluster into tercets or quatrains with no set metre. A noticeable feature of this collection, one that gives it a formal unity that is thankfully disturbed from time to time, is Heaney’s tendency to write poems or sections of verses that add up to twelve lines, with perhaps the Hopkinsian ghost of a curtal sonnet in mind. Some poems, like ‘Derry Derry Down’, also shorten line-length to Imagistic, breath-taking brevity: ‘The lush/Sunset blush/On a big ripe//Gooseberry’.

While Human Chain begins by overtly turning to French tradition, going on to Latin myths, it closes on a more distinctly ancient Irish note. ‘Sweeney Out-Takes’ brings us back to Heaney’s Sweeney poems in Sweeney Astray (1983) and Station Island (1984). Although Heaney has often ventured beyond the bounds of the Celtic Twilight exhortation to favour Celtic mythology over Greek and Latin lore, he has greatly contributed to returning Celtic legend to the forestage of the international literary scene, like T. S. Eliot before him. Linking with Old Irish authors is at the very source of Heaney’s poetic gift: his enthusiasm for the Middle Irish period (c.900-1200) genre known as dinnseanchas (the mantra-like evocation of locations and the lore linked to them) is again made evident in ‘Loughanure’. Heaney’s archaic-sounding word clusters also cling together cogently in the translated diction of the twelfth-century mystical Irish scribe-cum-missionary monk Colum Cille (c.521-597), known in Ireland as the patron saint of poets: ‘My quill has a tapered point./Its birdmouth issues a blue-dark/Beetle-sparkle of ink.’

The single Sweeney poem in this collection comes as a welcome reminder that, like Derek Walcott’s, some of Heaney’s greatest poems have been dramatic monologues: ‘Bog Queen’ and ‘Act of Union’ (both in Heaney’s most memorable collection North), to name but two of his best, are voiced respectively by a bog-bound sacrificial victim and a male personification of England describing his imperial conquest in sexually violent terms.

Walcott’s collection White Egrets, published earlier this year, is fraught with the fear of being foresaken by the Muse. While Heaney’s collection shows none of this desertion anxiety, it suffers slightly from what one might perceive as a lack of self-renewal. The recourse to dramatic monologue, that both poets master so resoundingly well, is something that could energise future collections.

If truth be told, as the Irish often say, some of Heaney’s poems tend to lack a little lustre. Some of the poems in this collection are somewhat slight and unmemorable. Even in a poem such as ‘Route 101’ (which Eamon Grennan has hyperbolically praised as Heaney’s tour de force) the reference to Louis O’Neill, the Troubles victim immortalised in Heaney’s poem ‘Casualty’ (Field Work, 1979), comes as a (mildly) saddening reminder of how far Heaney has relaxed away from his most ambitious poems. One is sometimes given the impression that the poet’s hallmarks (the restraint, the unflustered calmness, modesty and evenness of tone, the ‘placid beauty’, to quote another reviewer) stem from a little too much quietism: Heaney’s recent poetry shows no real evidence of a search for renewal or experiment. What it shows us is a great but slightly self-indulgent poet in repose, leaning on his Swedish laurels, placidly picking off the wordgrapes and somnolently pushing them into the illustrious muse’s mouth. The sense of strangeness and intensity evoked by the speaker lying in the ambulance in ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ is something that could also be drawn on more to galvanise this sometimes lazy lyricism, this sense of wallowing in the soft and gentle clover of a by now somewhat saponaceous Parnassian slope. The remoteness, the milky mildness and calm acceptance run the risk of becoming slightly soporific. Heaney’s tone is on occasion a little too comfortably ensconced in that lavishly leather-bound literary armchair: there is no sense of taking on new subjects, trying out new voices, no real raging against the dying of the light.

And yet this quibble is a partial injustice to the collection. The reference to writing instruments, for instance, can bring out a freshness of diction that compensates for Heaney’s sometimes over-dusty recourse to Latin phrases. ‘The Conway Stewart’ really brings the ink pen to life with its Joycean attention to small beautiful grotesqueries: ‘The nib uncapped,/ Treating it to its first deep snorkel/In a newly opened ink-bottle,//Guttery, snottery’. Heaney also allows Colm Cille’s pen to spit its speckles of ink into refreshingly strange-looking English word combinations, and the title of one of the last poems in the collection comes as a bit of a wake-up call: ‘Lick the Pencil’ offers a pleasingly untypical departure from a little too much genteel rural urbanity.