‘Crosshatched’ Connectivity, Vulnerability and Creative Renewal in Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain

The author Colm Toibín salutes the fact that in his final collection, Human Chain, Seamus Heaney ‘wrote about growing older and weaker with a shivering honesty and grace’.1 Honesty inheres in this volume’s unflinching recognition of mortality in terms of injury, illness, depletion of powers and death; grace, in its remarkable formal achievement, but also in its exploration of an alternative order of being to the betrayals and loss that seem given in human history.