Customer Reviews

The Spirit Level: Poems

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level is another meticulously crafted collection of spirited poems by the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney never disappoints. He brings to quite small poems, such as his lyrical reflection on mint, the same intense gaze which illuminates his poems dealing with the more complex concerns of religious faith and history. His poetry, while deeply embedded in the traditions of Irish writing, constantly surprises the reader with its flashes of sheer contemporary intelligence and language. The way Heaney effortlessly weds these has created a formidable and distinct poetic voice. For me, some of the most memorable poems in this collection are from the sequence, "Mycenae Lookout", a re-telling of the Trojan Wars. These display his easy shifts from a contemporary imagination to one equally informed by history. In his own words from the final poem of this collection, "Postcript", Heaney can "catch the heart off guard and blow it open". A must for any serious poetry lover.

It is very easy to automatically compare Seamus Heaney with WB Yeats: they are both Irish, they both write about Irish legend and the Irish landscpae, yet the similaritiues stop there. In the first publications of poems from Heaney since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature he deals with subjects which strike a chord of sincerity for his reader, as was the case in many of his earlier poems, but this latest work is more stylistically controlled. This does not mean that he stays within a more limited framework, on the contrary, you feel that this collection is a fist hand demonstration of the growth of Heaney as a poet. He tackles the highly complex and political theme of the Ireland Troubles brilliantly in 'Mycenae Lookout', but then returns to the evocatively simple style that we find in 'St Kevin and the Blackbird'. The whle collection is so efforlessly skillful that you wonder why it took him so long to complete it. It is only after the second or third reading that the deeper complexities are absorbed. It is here that the reader may find some of the weaknesses of the collection. Heaney, although a master of his style, his poetry is not quite as intricate as, say TS Eliot, nor is it as impassioned or spontaneous as Beaudelaire (not that I am Heaney specifically to these poets alone, they too have their many weaknesses where Heaney excels). Despite this, Heaney is truly one of the best contemporary poets, and I personally feel he has many great works still to come.

I wish I could say I liked or understood these poems more than I do. Seamus Heaney is a Nobel- Prize winning, and most highly regarded poet. This volume is the first which appeared after he received the Nobel Prize. The 'spirit level' is a reference to a carpenter's tool used to level things off. The collection is supposedly built in one sense around the idea of 'balance', material and spiritual balance.
The first thing that struck me about the poetry is the richness of its vocabulary, the frequency of neologism. Heaney was a student of Anglo- Saxon , and his translation of 'Beowulf' is considered one of the best. Clearly he has a mastery of the language and its rhythms . And he has a strong sense too of the observed natural world. A lot of his lines are lines of precise seeing .
"And some time make the time to drive out west
Into Country Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate- grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong- looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater."

Again this is powerful and precise observation, and clear strong language.
Nonetheless in reading the poems I did not get from them what I do get from the poetry of his great countryman , Yeats. Yeats is filled with memorable lines and a music which sings, rings and lingers in the mind.
Heaney is intellectually complex and scholarly. Aside from my difficulty in just understanding the plain sense , the music , as I read the poems aloud somehow escapes me.
Yet I am very well aware that I am probably talking more about my own limitations , rather than Heaney's.

Seamus Heaney has never shied away from the fact that poetry is craft as much as art- a duality neatly exemplified by the title of his latest collection.For Heaney, poetry itself is the spirit level, the tool with which balance is found, whether that balance be between his hatred of the troubles dividing Ireland and his own ambivalence about his role in them, or between the pleasures of reminiscence and the uncomfortable responsibilities of adulthood that transform reminiscence into idyll.

The sensuality of Heaney's poetry is unavoidable and joyous, from the auditory fantasy of "The Rain Stick" through the ludicrous picture painted in "Keeping Going" to the gentle admonition of "Postscript" to open ourselves to the wonderful in the everyday. His portraiture is always accurately scaled- the minimalist charcoal sketch of "Sandymount Strand" is as appropriate to its subject as the Norman Rockwell painting that is "A Sofa In The Forties". That Heaney is a master of both is no surprise- but it's always a pleasure.

Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (FSG, 1996)

Seamus Heaney has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Which is quite an achievement, and makes it a very daunting task to review one of his books. Perhaps more daunting for me (and those like me) than most; I'm a published poet myself, though the times when my poems have appeared anywhere Heaney's might crop up are very few and far between. It's probably easier for someone who hasn't been that route to read The Spirit Level with a critical eye-- someone who hasn't tried to think in poetry, to speak it, to write it, and then to send it out into the world on its merry way, to get published one percent of the time and rejected the other ninety-nine percent. It's a tough business we're in. Well, were in, in my case, as my last piece published in a printed journal was a decade or so ago. Who am I to do anything that smells like a critique on a book written by a Nobel prizewinner?

Ah, thank the gods there is hubris, for without it, life would be ever so boring.

Now, having read all that, I'm relatively sure you can guess that what follows is not going to be the sycophantic ravings of a fanboy. It's not going to be a trashing, but for the work of a Nobel Prize-winning poet, I found it both unmoving and unchallenging; perhaps "safe" might be the best word to describe it.

Heaney's work is the epitome of what gets called "academic" poetry, with that derisive sneer. It's thick to the point of impenetrability, either because it's so intensely personal that only those close to the poet or have studied his work obsessively will understand the symbolism or because Heaney is so unconcerned with giving the reader anything into which to sink his teeth that he's lost sight of the fact that there's an audience reading this stuff.

That said, there is, of course, a reason that Heaney won the Nobel Prize. He knows how to put syllables together, and if you're willing to overlook the fact that you'll have to put in hours of analysis per poem in order to get the merest shred of meaning out of it, at least a decent amount of what's here sounds good. ** ½

Well, with the exception of a few quality lines like those in Cassandra, Whitby-sur-Moyola, and At Banagher, I'd have to say that the Spirit Level was (sad to say), for the most part, a waste of my time. But, instead of bashing it totally, I'll point out a few significant lines that I enjoyed and kept me from giving it one star.
From Cassandra:
"No such thing as innocent bystanding... no such thing as innocent."
From Whitby-sur-Moyola:
"...Unabsorbed in what he had to do/ But doing it perfectly, and watching you."
From At Banagher:
"Does he ever question what it all amounts to/ Or ever will? Or care where he lays his head?"
While I usually enjoy poetry, I had a VERY hard time getting into this book. It seems to me that a modern Irishman would have a few more quality poems, but maybe they are quality poems, but not being a modern Irishman, I can't understand them. But, I guess if he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I'm probably the one who's mistaken. Perhaps I'm a little too surface to understand the intellectual depth of his poetry.