[In the following excerpt, Hosmer assesses the style and theme of The Spirit Level.]

Most of Heaney's poetry is eminently accessible. His latest collection, The Spirit Level, is no exception. Open the book at random, say to “A Brigid's Girdle” or “The Gravel Walks,” and you're immediately drawn in effortlessly to worlds both new and familiar. The language is clear as fresh rainwater and clean as crisply laundered linen, the structure polished, the moment lived through, without seam or crack visible.

Heaney's verse is also richly musical, a mixture of the idioms of home country speech, Christian hymns and the learned diction of European humanistic literature, all somehow “naturally” blended into lines of striking rhythm and clarity. In simple objects—clay, straw, an old sofa, a 56-lb. weight, a whitewash brush—history and meaning reside. In “Mint,” Heaney's eye lights upon the often unnoticed—a cluster of mint, “unverdant ever, almost beneath notice”—and sees in it an image that embraces “the disregarded we turned against / Because we'd failed them by our own disregard.” As Craig Raine has noted, Heaney's eye is so sharp, his ability to describe what he sees so powerfully precise, that “the actual comes to seem marvelous.” Heaney's verse renders the essence of Aeschylus' monumental “Agamemnon” in a series of five distinctively varied poetic panels, “Mycenae Lookout,” that capture the panorama of exposure, suffering and tragedy with cinematic focus and swiftness. “A Call,” a rather brief lyric in five stanzas that moves inexorably to a poignant crescendo—“Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him”—demonstrates how a master poet achieves emotional impact without a hint of sentimentality.

The Spirit Level displays the power of a deeply historical and personal memory focused in images that are then refracted so that their rays illumine even the dark and violent corners of an existence ever in flux. In a collection without a single misstep, without a merely average poem two poems stand out: “Keeping Going,” a haunting tribute to a “dear brother,” sharer of childhood experience who has stayed behind on the farm and witnessed the bloodshed brought by sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, yet has gone on. The poem is a lesson for poetry workshops on using apt and evocative imagery to give integrity to composition. Heaney's poetry is a meditating force, all the more powerful for its restraint, what he calls in “Weighing In” “the power of power not exercised.” That is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in “The Sharping Stone,” arguably the best poem in the collection. This bittersweet, altogether human recollection of a departed father breaks the reader's heart—only later do you realize the technical mastery of the structure and verse line.

The Spirit Level is the triumph of an imagination and spirit continuously refreshed, renewed and reinvigorated from many sources. Seamus Heaney's poetry, to borrow lines from his own poem, “At the Wellhead,” is “like a silver vein in heavy clay, / Night water glittering in the light of day.” In words taken from this collection's last poem, “Postscript,” it has the power to “catch the heart off guard and break it wide open.”