By this stage, the verdict on Seamus Heaney’s latest and now Forward-prize-winning collection Human Chain has been reached; most of the reviews are in and all of Heaney’s reviewers can be heard singing exultantly from the same hymn-sheet. In Nick Laird’s words it is Heaney’s ‘Book of the Dead, centred on sadness and loss’; for Eamon Grennan it is the poet’s ‘first book of old age’, while in Colm Tóibín’s view it is ‘a book of shades and memories’. Nor did it take long for Heaney himself to review his own reviews. As he told the BBC: ‘I didn’t have such a strong sense of mortality running through the book until the reviews began to appear. It daunted me. I thought, this sounds like he’s writing his own obituaries.’ Whatever about Heaney writing his own obituaries, it does sound at times as though he is writing his own reviews. Grennan’s perfectly-pitched appraisal is liberally seasoned with trademark terms from the Heaney word-hoard: ‘depth-charges’, ‘amplifications’, and so on. This tendency among Heaney devotees to ape his signature verbal flourishes testifies to the seductive force of his sumptuous critical rhetoric and shows the extent to which his poetic judgment has become the exemplar for contemporary poetry criticism.

Moreover, as his comment to the BBC reminds us, Heaney is a poet who keeps a close eye on his own critical reception as he prepares the ground for posterity. As a poet and reader, he has long been aware of the construct that is ‘Heaney’: ‘the textual creature who was living a life separate from you in the newsprints’, as he has described it. ‘I dwell in this house and in the cities and Heaney lives in the country and in his memory and elsewhere’, he explained in the 2009 documentary film of his life Out of the Marvellous. Throughout Human Chain, the ‘textual figure’ looms into view as never before in a collection that seems to be concerned as much with its own futurity as with remembrances of things past. In the opus posthumus that is Human Chain, literary posterity, not human death, is the true focal point. The fact that two of its poems speak to two of contemporary poetry’s most influential critics is not insignificant. Addressing his posthumous readership as much as his present readers, Heaney dedicates the title poem to the academic critic Terence Brown, while ‘Hermit Songs’ is dedicated to the leading American poetry scholar and author of a seminal study of Heaney, Helen Vendler. ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying’, Woody Allen once quipped, but for Heaney immortality is to be achieved precisely through work.

‘How do you think of your childhood? How do you imagine it?’ Heaney contemplates with furrowed brow during the course of a 2008 interview with Paul Muldoon. To my mind, these questions go to the heart of his poetic project and to the heart of Human Chain itself where strategies of re-imagining and re-visioning are central. Throughout, we find the poet foregrounding issues of self-representation, caught up in the process of turning, or translating, the limited span of a human lifetime into a living art-form. The idea of how our lives become stories is key. ‘In a sense I was almost introducing him as subject matter’, Heaney has described introducing his ‘unshorn and bewildered’ father to the American poet Louis Simpson, an occasion which is remembered in ‘Making Strange’ in Station Island. In Human Chain, ever in thrall to the literary life, Heaney’s courtship of his wife, the ‘princess’, becomes the stuff of fairytale in the visceral sequence ‘Eelworks’. Elsewhere, in the final poem in the sequence ‘Album’, a moment which has Heaney’s son ambushing his grandfather with a hug puts the poet in mind of his own attempts at embracing his father as recounted in the previous poem in the sequence: ‘an embrace in Elysium // swam up in to my very arms’. Three times Virgil’s Aeneas tried and failed to embrace his father’s elusive apparition. It is the poem that is embraced in the poet’s arms as, despite the note of regret, art compensates for life’s disappointments. Moreover, Heaney is instructing the reader on how the preceding poem in ‘Album’ should be read; that is, with Virgil in mind. Thus, the historical Heaney’s instance of inability is elevated into the realm of myth as he assumes the form of Aeneas. This self-mythologizing impulse is evident in ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ where Heaney, recovering from a stroke that has induced high levels of poetic recall, is seen doing physiotherapy in a hospital corridor. Not content with being all too human in this vulnerable pose, he casts himself in bronze as the victorious Charioteer of Delphi who, unflinching, stead-fast, ‘holds his own’: ‘His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own’. A heroic Heaney still holds the reins, even in the face of debilitation. Later, in ‘The Wood Road’, he remembers what would prove to be a defining moment for a self growing into adult authority: ‘Looked up to, looking down, / Allowed the reins like an adult’. The power to exert artistic control over ordinary life experience is crucial.

Continuing his preoccupation with the writing and the written life, the poet’s pen is the subject of ‘The Conway Stewart’; a marvellously Joycean affair of sound as the pen comes to life ‘guttery, snottery’ in this portrait of the artist as the son of an ashplant-yielding father and a mother who, in ‘Album’, tends the firebox of creativity. At times however, the self-mythologizing approach seems too contrived as every event in his low and rustic life has to be made to ‘gleam’ – a word that sounds repeatingly. In this regard, one of the least successful poems in the collection is ‘Route 110’ in which the hinterland of Heaney’s childhood is overlaid with mythic import and a bus route of yore becomes Virgilian in aspect. Heaney’s Virgil-tinted glasses certainly lend a sepia tone to the retrospective journey but at times his myth-vision creates a flat, colourless effect as the unvarying stanza patterns buckle under the pressure of conveyance, as in the clunky line: ‘Handed me one it as good as lit me home’. Travelling along ‘Route 110’ the reader encounters more than one such pothole. ‘Venus’ doves? Why not McNicholl’s pigeons?’ Heaney self-reflexively enquires in the same poem, calling attention yet again to the writing process itself and to the very deliberate mythic method that is being deployed in writing the self. ‘Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation’, Heaney bemoans in ‘Album’ but it seems a disingenuous lament for the lost moment as, if life may be remade in art, then the ‘apt quotation’ (by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) has not arrived belatedly for the life of the poem. Life is flawed, limited; the achieved, timeless poem is the true end of human activity. Indeed, the very first keynote-striking poem in Human Chain relates the heady surprise of catching a new poem, an event that has the alert poet ‘alive and ticking like an electric fence’ as art creates its own life-force.

As well as being deeply inter-textual in the usual Heaney way, there is throughout Human Chain constant reference to other art forms as the poet explores the various media through which transient, temporary life may be made permanent. ‘Canopy’ commemorates David Ward’s 1994 public art installation at Harvard University which took place over a two-week period between the hours of dusk and darkness. For this evocative performance of light and sound, tape recordings of speakers reading in different languages on the theme of place were hung from the branches of the trees in Harvard Yard. For the literary-fixated Heaney the effect is, predictably, akin to that of Dante’s wood of the suicides and this obvious literary allusion unfortunately overrides the earlier simile which was more instinctively and more imaginatively rooted in the earthier discourse of church-going experience, likening the experience to, ‘a recording / Of antiphonal responses / In the congregation of leaves’. We can hear this in our inner ears. Set amid the vibrant, conversant world of grave-side vegetation, the preceding poem, ‘A Herbal’, after Guillevic, articulates the desire to capture the fleeting music of the human moving in nature so that it may be repeated continuously over time:

Remember how you wanted

The sound recordist

To make a loop,

Wildtrack of your feet

Through the wet

At the foot of a field?

Heaney is a poet who is, above all, committed to a sonorous poetics of sound and sense, deeply attuned to the aural design of poetry, and so it seems fitting to find him preoccupied here with how the ephemeral quality of passing sound can be harnessed perpetually and in a poem that deploys the sound-pattern of alliteration to create a memorable sound-world of its own; the foot-steps of the walker (‘At the foot of a field’) echoed in the line’s anapaestic foot. As Heaney in ‘Eelworks’ listens to the ‘rare, recorded voice’ of Walter de la Mare, he must be reminded of how he too may live on in the form of the disembodied ‘voice of the poet’.

Throughout, the visual arts are invoked for their ability to fix select images in the mind, to represent finite lived experience and thus counteract the blank featurelessness of death. In ‘Uncoupled’ Heaney’s parents are immured in photographic form, but, although the snapshots provide an imaginative entry-point into the past, each parent remains cut off, unable to interact. What is more, both parents are now doubly ‘uncoupled’ in the closed-off space of the poem. Later, in his elegy for the painter Nancy Wynne Jones Heaney remembers her working methods, enacting, through a chain of provisional, shifting metaphors, her transfiguration from being a living artist at work to the artist of posterity who lives in art. Following on from this, the painter Colin Middleton narrows his eyes ‘to size you up / As if you were a canvas’, as life is already material for art in ‘Loughanure’. With ‘So this is what an afterlife can come to?’ Heaney ponders the immortality of the artist and, by extension, his own immortalisation. In ‘Derry Derry Down’ Heaney paints scenes from life in vivid colours as the backdrop of his childhood – the ‘storybook / Back kitchen’ –becomes a ‘Still life / On the red tiles / Of that floor’. ‘Poems that are wanting to be pictures’ is how Heaney has defined his domestic diptych ‘Mossbawn: Dedication’ from North (1975) as ‘Sunlight’ ‘really wants to be a Vermeer’ while ‘The Seed Cutters’ is ‘a Brueghel that hasn’t been painted yet’ and painterly textures feature significantly in Human Chain.

‘Film it in sepia, / Drip-paint it in blood’ Heaney as film director commands in ‘The Wood Road’, in a bid to have this scenic thoroughfare remain stubbornly as it is; enhanced, but in essence, unchanging: ‘Resurfaced, never widened’. The impulse to craft a life onto film is pointed up in lines from ‘Wraiths’, a poem that hinges on the shadow life, the condition of being between states:

Zoom in over our shoulders,

A tunnelling shot that accelerates and flares.

Discover us against weird brightness. Cut.

In ‘In the Attic’ Heaney, ‘marooned / In his own loft’, becomes Jim Hawkins from the Treasure Island of his formative school-days. Here again, moments from life are rendered eerily cinematic, as ‘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.’ Memory is ‘a-waver’ too for the poet at pains to recall and recreate in language. Indeed, it may have been Heaney’s work on the documentary Out of the Marvellous that prompted him to consider how the whole trajectory of a life and career may be artfully shaped on film. All of the poems in Human Chain are self-conscious of their status as art, as textual representations, and all of these various screens, scrims, films and canvases create a distancing effect as the boundaries between life and art, word and image are kept in focus and refuse to simplify or dissolve.

More than anything else the collection pivots on the action of translation. ‘Ask me to translate’ is the opening injunction of ‘The Riverbank Field’ while ‘waiting, watching’ the young poet as fisherman is ‘needy and ever needier for translation’ in ‘Route 110’. In keeping with the activity of fishing, the verb ‘to translate’ means to carry over or transfer from one person, place or condition to another. Translation, then, may occur from life into art, from world into word, from life into death and back, as well as from one language into another; ‘between languages’ is where the poet finds himself as he travels to the Gaeltacht. Heaney is a consummate translator in all of these senses and each of the poems here bear the marks of some form of translation. Thus, it must also be the human chain of literary and imaginative translation over the centuries and across the world that the title of the collection refers to. That the artistic enterprise is the work of translation and that it demands great exertion is clear. Human Chain contains a number of fine, load-bearing poems that display the effort of their own construction; the syntax is deliberately laboured at points and frequently poems open on obtrusive words such as ‘Not’, ‘But’, ‘And’, ‘Had’, or with an interrogative ‘Who’. Words are weighted on the page, testament to the poet’s arduous work to convey them from one realm to another. Often, poetic description is revealed as a site of effortful struggle as the poet is seen groping after the exact simile or metaphor only to have to resign himself to approximations, such as: ‘Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal,’ in ‘Slack’, or in ‘Death of a Painter’ where the same formulation: ‘Not Cézanne, / More Thomas Hardy’ is then qualified further ‘Not Hardy but a butterfly’ and finally ‘not a butterfly but Jonah’. ‘Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination’, Robert Lowell wrote in his ‘Epilogue’. In Human Chain poetic accuracy is hard-won and the torsion and tensions involved in wresting words into poetry are deeply felt throughout.

Words are material for Heaney, loaded with music and meaning. It is their resonances, the ‘back-echo’ as he calls it – in ‘Canopy’ ‘the hush and backwash and echo’ – that comprise the formative energy of his work. Like Ward’s light and sound installation, the highlights of the book are truly luminous, kinetic works of art and the two poems that, for me, stand out are the elegy for the musician David Hammond and ‘A Kite for Aibhín’. The former has the poet listening to silence in a truly self-estranging moment as the fact of Hammond’s absence is carried over into the final launching image of the airplane that has left its hangar and is now eternally suspended, air-borne. Hammond has been conveyed elsewhere, to a zone where words cannot reach and yet it is words that fill the silence and darkness of life as the poem takes the place of the song in the air. In ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ – based on Giovanni Pascoli’s ‘L’Aquilone’ which Heaney has translated into English – the force of translation lifts off generating a dynamic, echoic current of words. Between worlds, the kite tugs between earth and sky, just as the poem of the same name moves across temporal and spatial zones and between languages. Charged with its own inter-textual energies this is the same kite that was flown by Heaney’s father and is given to his sons in ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’ in Station Island while the ‘long-tailed comet’ remembers the comet of Heaney’s ‘Exposure’ from North. In that earlier kite-flying poem the kite signified the ‘strain’ of grief that must be passed on from one generation to the next but here art replaces human emotion as the gift to be given over. Poetic tradition bears this kite-poem aloft as the ‘white wing beating high’ surely recalls the ‘great wings beating still’ in Yeats’ poem of poetic inspiration and mastery ‘Leda and the Swan’. Ultimately, the poem, like the kite, yearns for release; to escape the heavy, mortal control of the poet’s ‘hand [...] like a spindle / Unspooling’. Art requires both a holding fast to and a letting go, just as the poem-as-kite is a heavy, man-made structure that becomes light when it lifts off the ground and breaks free. As long as the poet can ‘imagine still’ (as he puts it in ‘In the Attic’, with that word ‘still’ hovering between its two meanings) art is possible. What seems clear from his latest collection is that Heaney is thrusting his words far beyond the fact of his own silence and into the living, clamorous textual spaces of posterity.

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain, Faber and Faber, 2010.  £12.99.  978-0-571269-22-8

© Maria Johnston, 2010

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.