News at Eleven: Many poems are tender and welcoming

but [Seamus] Heaney was never one for false consolation.

There are bracing elegies here too. "The door was open and the house was dark", in memory of David Hammond, is especially arresting because it refuses the dead man even the briefest afterlife in poetry. Instead, Heaney explores the silence after a death. It is a wonderful idea that silence should develop a life of its own, journeying through the second stanza and retiring into the street.

from The Guardian: Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
also The Guardian: Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

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