News at Eleven: The poems are pervaded by an awareness

of mortality, of encroaching darkness. At times this awareness proves nearly too sad to bear:

Derek Hill's saying,
The last time he sat at our table,
He could no longer bear to watch
The sun going down
And asking please to be put
With his back to the window.

Many of these poems feel like elegies, longing wistfully for a vanished world or expressing the desire that that world might somehow be restored.

from The Washington Post: "Human Chain," a new collection of poetry by Seamus Heaney
then The New York Times: Shared Homeland, Different Worldview


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