Seamus Heaney @ EIBF

 

Have you ever been spellbound? It was only when I emerged from the Book Festival tent after listening to Seamus Heaney read poems from his latest collection Human Chain, that I realised I had been: Heaney the white wizard, his words his staff and listening to him a small moment of grace.
In his latest collection Heaney captures and celebrates the ties that bind us to others through quiet, unflustered retrospectives on the relationships in his life, memories and departures. Without eking out trite symbolism from meaningless gestures, Heaney reflects on bygones and inanimate objects – fountain pens, old brown jackets - and lends them a weight so poignant they are well placed alongside the mythological references and figures from antiquity. Two poems were of particular note: The Harvest Bow and The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark. The former, an old poem given new meaning through Heaney’s recitation and the latter, a new poem, back lit by the recitation so that upon subsequent reading insight is more immediate - 'a not unwelcoming / Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar / On an overgrown airfield in late summer' - the lightness of acceptance rather than the morbidity of loss. [Renée Rowland]