If we ask what the eponymous chain is made of, the answer could easily be tercets: a great part of this new collection of Heaney’s poetry is constructed from three-line stanzas. They are frequently terse and unrhymed, occasionally opening out as far as the pentameter line. Moreover, the chains are further linked or bonded, in that the lyrics recurrently form suites: as in the nine-part ‘Hermit Songs’, dedicated to his old ally, the formidable Helen Vendler, a set of meditations which characteristically takes him back to the schooldays of saints and pen-nibs.

Oh yes, Heaney is rooted in his muddy northern-Irish past, its very gumboot-trodden farmyard, as well as in the nurturing classrooms. Reading now, I find that Human Chain is densely packed with evocations of a milieu that will be even stranger to many of us than Thomas Hardy’s, yet inward in the same way as the older poet’s. It is solidly there, available if you are willing to read hard and respond simply – and to feel your way into its piecemeal successiveness. Heaney writes, in one lyric,

Long gazing at the hill – but not Cézanne,More Thomas Hardy working to the endIn his crocheted old heirloom of a shawl.

To which a modern reader might ask whether the third line is a touch of deliberate bufferism, an unearned archaic touch of the genuine. Hard to say, but the book yearns back again and again to memory-slides from what the Leavisites might have called an organic past. And this raises an uneasy question, which is whether a poet who has been raised in a traditional farming community has natal advantages over mere townies and academics.

Yet Heaney has been an academic as well, but in dear old Boston, once ‘the land of the bean and the cod’, and more or less his fiefdom in some recent decades. To his ambiguous credit, he doesn’t produce poetry about Cambridge, Massachusetts – ‘Canopy’ a rare exception here – but focuses his gaze above all on the Ireland of his youth and of his present Wicklow retreat. He still evokes elderberry and ragwort, or simply the family house’s hallway linoleum, a flooring material which must already be slipping away from young people’s awareness.

Readers might be touched by different homages and insights: for example, with ‘Eelworks’, that strange titular noun takes us back into slimy country Heaney has evoked before. It is a region of the heart that still contains the hay-bailer, the fountain pen, midge-drifts, the fork-lift, and ‘a votive jampot on the dresser shelf’.

This poetry is very unlike that of the frequently Horace Walpoleish world that has succeeded his generation, of which he dryly reflects that ‘Ashbery’s poetry matched the uncannily insulated, materially comfortable, volubly docile condition of a middle-class population on the move between its shopping malls and its missile silos’. On the evidence of his poetry, Heaney still inhabits a world of moral responsibility and carefully weighed democratic choice. Even from Derry and Belfast he inhabited that ethical symposium to which Dr Leavis spoke.

But what is best in this well-tempered assemblage of shortish poems? It would be hard to say, so careful is the craftsmanship. I am fond of the title piece, yet that might only be because I, like Heaney, have worked at lugging bags of grain. ‘Album’ is a fine, calm suite in memory of his father, but ‘The Wood Road’ is probably the toughest poem here, with its memories of the Troubles, including a child’s vision of rifle-barrels and of (incidental, as it happens) blood.

Human Chain is not an easy book, having few poems that stand out, its loyalty, its pietàs, distributed among many loved people, places and things. The core might in the end be ‘Route 101’, a Virgilian journey through darknesses, beginning on a bus yet ending with a ‘bunch of stalks and silvered heads’ gathered to welcome a newborn child.

Framing the new volume of poems, we have the five hundred pages of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, a life in gathered tesserae and successive books.

This chunky volume is most unusual. On the one hand it is a coolly tropical archipelago. On the other, it is a sustained dialogue or guided democracy, in that all the interviews are conducted and shaped by the one person, the distinguished Dublin poet Dennis O’Driscoll. So it is as near as we are likely to get to an autobiography of Heaney, whose poetry, early or late, sits very close to the contours of his life. He was never a poet to evoke ‘some shit in a shuttered chateau’, to quote his ambiguous ally, Philip Larkin.

So closely, indeed, that he is not as celebrated as he was, at least among a younger generation who are more electronic and citified: those whom Peter Costello has caricatured as not at home with ‘open spaces or pristine forests but the crowded cafes and asphalt alleys of inner-city living’. For some of these readers an old-fashioned farm in County Derry is more remote than Dallas or Houston. And Heaney’s precise poetic retrieval can hark way back to Thomas Hardy Land.

For all this, Heaney must be the most internationally available of poets in the language: more so, I would hazard, than such ostensible peers as Merwin, Walcott, Murray, and C.K. Williams. He is the poet of clarity, decency, and the maintenance of tradition – the last-named a possible offence in some quarters. His poetry sits well on high school syllabi. Even more than P.V. Glob, he put the bog people on our worldwide mental map, our Google-world. Where he stands in the new age of Hellenistic Anne Carson, it would be hard to say; only her merry namesake, Ciaran, turns up here.

So back to Stepping Stones and its filiations of a life all the way from Castledawson, with its ‘Horses and carts, donkeys and carts even, though they were rare enough’, down the years through Harvard and Stockholm to Heaney’s stroke and recovery. Childhood is available to him in remarkably fine detail, for he is such a deeply rooted poet, his mind mulched down inpastness. The first two chapters here are full of the farmers’ demesne, with its productivity of ‘Hay, oats, grass seed, potatoes, turnips, kale’.

He left that world, first for boarding school, where he began to be moved by the poetry of Hopkins and Macneice, among others, then off to university in Belfast. It was in the early 1960s that he was pricked by ‘the lust of the unpublished’. Soon enough he was taken up by Faber and Faber, the jackpot house.

In fact, chapters three to fifteen of O’Driscoll’s book approach the poet’s life through his successive books, taking his friends on board as they go. They are meshed with Heaney’s canny judgements, including a defence of Yeats’s core achievement, despite ‘the whole masquerade’. We see the ways in which he has been affected by such differing poets as Frost, Lowell and Milosz. And his Irish chums, usually male, tread in and out of the pages.

Turning south, Heaney has a particularly shrewd appraisal of our Les: ‘for all his Aussie demotic, Murray puts torsions and tractions on his language that ratchet it up as often as they rein it in’; and an intriguing take on Vincent Buckley’s politics. But Australia was always a long way off, despite his visit to Melbourne in the 1990s and the suburban kangaroos we turned on for him in the gardens of Warrandyte. Life in the world is like that: Australia is a long way from most places.

The figurative stepping stones O’Driscoll has granted him have taken Heaney, book by book, through to a last chapter, ‘Coda’, in which he is pressed to sum up his views and beliefs, after going gravely through the disorientation of his 2006 stroke. Yeats still treads on his heels, while inescapable Catholicism lies in wait at every turn. And any attentive reader will have picked up the great importance Ted Hughes has long had for this, very different, literary imagination. But if one sentence could serve as Seamus Heaney’s conclusion it would be that ‘Poetry represents the need for an ultimate court of appeal’.

Stepping Stones is rounded out with a bibliography, a glossary and a detailed chronology, largely accurate and surely helpful. The book is full of illuminating goodies.