Human Chain: Poems
Nostalgia and memory, numinous visions and the earthy music of compound adjectives together control the short poems and sequences of the Irish Nobel laureate's 14th collection of verse, a work of familiar strengths and unparalleled charm. Old teachers, schoolmates, farmhands, and even the employees of an  œEelworks  arrive transfigured through Heaney's command of sound: a schoolmate whose family worked in the eel trade  œwould 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.  The title poem applies Heaney's gift for physical mimesis to an image from the day's news:  œbags of meal passed hand to hand... by the aid workers  remind the poet of the grain-sacks he swung and dragged in his own youth. Other pages remember, and praise, libraries and classrooms--from grade school, from Harvard, and from medieval Irish monasteries, with their  œriddle-solving anchorites.  For all the variety of Heaney's framed glimpses, though, the standout poems grow from occasions neither trivial nor topical: Heaney in 2006 had a minor stroke, and the discreet analogies and glimpsed moments in poems such as  œChanson d'Aventure  (about a ride in an ambulance) and  œIn the Attic  ( œAs I age and blank on names ) bring his characteristic warmth and subtlety to mortality, rehabilitation, recent trauma, and old age.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.