This mortal coil

Among the most famous of all living poets, Nobel Laureate, highly educated, revered for his lectures and ideas as well as for his poetry, Seamus Heaney has a daunting reputation. He remains, however, enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers, accessible, song-like, direct, concerned with everyday details and human relationships. Essentially, Heaney’s poetry strikes to the heart through its central metaphor — the very mechanics of being human.

Human Chain, his latest collection, makes this familiar territory absolutely explicit, right from the title. Not only does the image of a ‘chain’ of being human concern itself with family loyalties, connections and inheritances, but it also represents the physical labour of sharing a heavy load, completing a painful task, moving the weight of each other down the line, from a child lifting his face to see a kite break free of its string, to the awkward lifts, hoists and straps used for the injured and the elderly, to the image of the title poem where a line of aid workers and soldiers swinging sacks of grain triggers the poet’s empathy as a physical sensation in his back and hands, marking out at once the limitations of the human frame and the spiritual connection that can move beyond those limits.