Seamus Heaney - Human Chain

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber)

Over the years there has been a tendency in reviewers of Heaney to welcome each new volume as a 'return to form'. There was a similar habit in reviews of David Bowie albums after the 1970's but whereas many of us suspect that Bowie never really regained the greatness of his tremendous sequence of LP's up to, say, Heroes, I have never been able to identify where Heaney is supposed to have ever lost it. This is his twelfth volume of poems and they seem to be consistently fine to me.

There is a sort of blueprint trajectory to the career of many, but by no means all, poets, in which 'maturity' doesn't arrive until the age of 35-40 and then after 60 there is sometimes a decline or lapse into repeating themselves. Again, this isn't necessarily applicable to Heaney and the most noticeable sign of his senior status in these new poems is in the number of poems 'in memoriam' of friends or other artists.

The human chain theme of the book is comparable to Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats with both aware of a network of human relationships but whereas Heaney's is generational and often within the family, Gunn's was emotional, sexual and being torn apart by the AIDS epidemic. But both involve a rich sense of community and both are suffering loss.

Heaney is sure-footed and with a disarming facility, his rhythms natural and organically a part of his thought and we are all invited to be 'vulnerable to delight', his generosity of spirit is undimmed like a sort of good-natured optimism and belief in humanity. For once, I began the book at the beginning and immediately the first poems lead you in to his world rich in sympathy and alive to the nuances of experience that he seems to translate so easily into language.

We are always aware that he is enjoying language and the power of specific, sometimes unexpected, words - 'spatulate', 'snottery', 'flop-heavy'- and also his consciousness of the literary, aware of Dante, Virgil and his classical predecessors.

The 'unfreshness' of his father's suits in a wardrobe is made attractive in one of the most moving poems, but the best is quite probably 'The door was open and the house was dark', another 'in memoriam' in which the silence and the absence spreads out from the house down the street and into the wider world. It is impressively understated in a book where not everything is quite so memorable and it might not be his best collection but I'm not sure I could say which is. A career without peaks and troughs contains fine poems from beginning to end and so doesn't so easily offer up a stand-out set but there's no suggestion yet that he is going through the motions as other great poets might sometimes do after 70. The previous book, District and Circle seemed to revisit his early chthontic (yes, chthontic !) concerns and this is inevitably also a look backwards in many ways but not in a way that suggests the repeating of the same themes. He is entirely comfortable in his own poetry and hardly likely to change much now.

Far too comfortable, though, it has to be said, is Faber's continuing house style in cover design. Their plain style seems to have dispensed with design almost completely as if their position as 'establishment' arbitors of taste and authority make such considerations beneath them and the mere thought of illustration or promotion something they have transcended. Publishers like Carcanet and Salt make much more of an effort and their books look the better for it. But the words inside speak for themselves and they appear to think that if they have Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson and suchlike on their list then they don't need to try any harder.