News at Eleven: Interviewed by Denis O'Driscoll, in Stepping Stones (2008),

[Seamus] Heaney spoke of a lifelong involvement with the Aeneid, and of how "The motifs of Book VI have been in my head for years--the golden bough, Charon's barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father". Human Chain draws much of its strength from this deep engagement with the Virgilian underworld and its secrets. The book may take bearings from literature, but it is far from being a literary exercise, still less an attempt at broadly conceived translation. Instead, Heaney allows questions of death and rebirth, forgetting and memory, and parents and children to set an agenda which the poems themselves both address and transform.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Seamus Heaney's Human Chain
then The Harvard Crimson: Seamus Heaney Returns to Old Haunts in 'Human Chain'

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