Seamus Heaney, Human Chain. New York: Farrar, Straus&Giroux, 2010. 96 pages. USD 24.00. In Aeneid VI Aeneas enters the world of the dead, to confront his own dead. He meets again his father Anchises, whom he had saved from the destruction of Troy, and who carried with him the gods, the traditions and memories of the Trojan past, to be reborn in Rome--the burden of memory, to be preserved and cherished to enrich the future. That theme of memory preserved and revivified has been central in Seamus Heaney's poetry, from the moment in 'Digging', the first poem in Death of a Naturalist (1966), when the poet takes his vow of commitment to poetry, feeling the pen between his fingers, and using it to preserve the memory of his father digging potatoes on the family farm, and of his grandfather who 'could cut more turf in a day/Than any other man on Toner's bog', images of a traditional way of life already fading. In 'Hermit Songs', a poem in this new collection, he again celebrates pens, ink, the act of writing, the manuscripts copied out long ago by Irish monks to preserve the poetry, legends and lore of ancient Ireland, and the racial memory, professing his own abiding faith 'In steady-handedness maintained/ In books against its vanishing'.
