Seamus Heaney's new collection highlights the ongoing connections and solidarities between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, within a vividly reminiscent present moment - the soles of the day, the weight and gravity of what passes from hand to hand, lifted and lowered.

Human Chain also explores broader questions about transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. It includes newly translated versions of anonymous early Irish verses, poems at the crossroads of oral and written tradition, as well as other 'hermit songs' that equally balance the art of the scribe and the poet's early calling as a scholar.

A notable sequence titled 'Route 110' maps the descent into the underworld of the Aeneid against unique moments of a life's arc, from the adolescence of the 1950s to the birth of the poet's first grandchild. Other poems exhibit a Virgilian pressure for the dead - friends, neighbors, and family - who are nonetheless entirely and affectingly folk.

Human Chain is Seamus Heaney's twelfth poetry collection.