The Spirit Level: Poems - Hardcover

Heaney, Seamus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374267790 ISBN 13: 9780374267797

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996

Synopsis

In this collection, as ever with Heaney, personal memory and humble domestic objects -- a whitewash brush, a sofa, a swing -- are endowed with talismanic significance, and throughout the collection he addresses his growing concerns, which inevitably include the political situation in his native Northern Ireland, in a poetry that never ceases to be fluid, alert, and completely truthful.

About this title

Review:

The title of Seamus Heaney's first collection of poetry since winning the Nobel Prize in 1995 is the term used in Ireland for a carpenter's level, an earthy physical allusion to matters of spirit that is quintessential Heaney. And indeed this volume deals masterfully with the finding of a level balancing point in ethical, moral, and spiritual affairs. Heaney has famously likened his craft to the farming activities of his childhood, comparing his pen to his father's spade; here he extends that analogy, comparing the lines of a poem to furrows being plowed in the earth, and "the poem as ploughshare that turns time/ Up and over." Heaney's furrows are straight and clean, his loamy lines abundantly fertile.

About the Author:

Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0374267790
• ISBN 13: 9780374267797
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 81