Details
Synopsis
This collection of poetry, combining the visionary with the actual, was inspired by the bubble in the spirit level and celebrates moments when the challenge of simply going on with life is transformed into a world of possibility.
| Size | | Length: | 81 pages | | Height: | 8.8 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 8.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
"What more shall we say of Heaney? We have already given him nearly every prize there is, our white-haired boy, our national treasure. The trouble is, he gets better, and this is indeed a trouble because continued praise, without some salt in it, loses savour....More and more, Heaney works like a camera commanded by an imaginative film-director, using asterisks between sections of a poem that act like film cuts, or fades....Heaney is the real thing, both as poet and as countryman (he knows you can gauge a beast's health by the smell of its urine). He sings creation, like his Caedmon, and as simply, giving shine and force to a last phrase we would have considered tired--until he uses it."
Spectator - P. J. Kavanagh (05/11/1996)
"Art as the wizardry of style, on the one hand, and art as personal and public expression, on the other. Not many can fuse the two nowadays, and no one writing in English does it so well as Heaney. He employ's poetry's power to tell truth, and the artist's power to make us know that it is a truth we need. His poems, elegant fountains, are also water; we realize it and grow thirsty."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Richard Eder (06/09/1996)
"So many of his poems have become personal lodestones for us that reading this new book is like awakening to an experience both fresh and familiar....His poems, resting at the balance points between what we see as opposites, can make us realize that at times our vision utterly deceives us. They will last. Anyone who reads poetry has reason to rejoice at living in the age when Seamus Heaney is writing."
New York Times Book Review - Richard Tillinghast (07/21/1996)
"If 'Seeing Things' (1991), his last volume, adumbrated a poetics of charmed stillnesses, of 'Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim', 'The Spirit Level' seeks out a more slippery and transitional state of being where, even in moments of balance, there are shivers of movement, where, on a loaded-down weighbridge, for instance, 'everything trembled, flowed with give and take'. This is, in short, not just a new book but a book with newness in it, as all Heaney's collections have been. It marks a sustained effort, not exactly to unite the two parts of himself and his cultural inheritance but rather to make the line between them more permeable than before."
Times Literary Supplement - Nicholas Jenkins (07/05/1996)
"Heany's best work in 'The Spirit Level' reminds us of the basic responsibilities of the craft. It shows not just what poetry can do but what great poetry must do."
Threepenny Review - Don Bogen
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