This is the 12th book of poems in about 50 years of writing by a great Northern Irish poet who is now in his eighth decade, 'and who recently recovered from a serious illness. Ageing and that brush with death have profoundly marked this new collection by Seamus Heaney. The change has stripped the poetry back to spare concentration on the small things of life—an old suit, the filling of a fountain pen, the hug that didn't happen—which then open up to ever fuller significance, the more closely they are examined. It has also made the poems easier to engage with: there are no puzzling Ulsterisms, for instance. Complications have been tossed aside. Words are no longer delved into for their etymological significance as they were in the 1970s. Now they are caressed for their mellifluousness. The collection feels personal—as if it had a compelling need to be written. A decade and a half ago Mr. Heaney told The Economist that once the evil banalities of sectarianism seemed to be receding, his verse was able to admit the 'big words' with which poetry had once abounded: soul and spirit, for example. In this collection both are present, at some level. The words describing a simple act—the passing of meal in sacks by aid workers onto a trailer—in the title poem, 'Human Chain', transform. this 12-line poem into a kind of parable. There is the collective, shared human burden of the act itself—the 'stoop and drag and drain' of the heavy lifting—and then there is the wonderful letting go: 'Nothing surpassed/That quick unburdening. ' Is the poet talking about the toil of life, and the aftermath of that toil? The poems snatch precious remembered moments. They linger over the sweetness of particulars—vetch, the feel of an eel on a line. They pay attention to the heightened ritual of everyday things. The lines are short but move at a gentle pace and need to be read slowly, as the verse drifts back and forth over its country setting like a long-legged fly on a stream. Above all, and this is an odd thing to say of words on a page, the book feels like handcrafted work. Time and again Mr. Heaney returns to the image of the pen. He began his long career writing of such a pen, nestling snug as a gun between finger and thumb. The gun, we hope, is history. The pen still nestles, fruitfully. What is the distinction between the 12th book of poems and others by Seamus Heaney?