[In the following review, Sen assesses the humanist impulses that inform The Spirit Level.]

Seamus Heaney's collection The Spirit Level is his first book of poems to appear following his 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature (see WLT 70:2, pp. 253-66) as well as being the first book of verse in five years after Seeing Things (see WLT 67:1, p. 182). As an aside, it may be interesting to note that his new book was in fact written (and was with the publishers) well before he received the prize itself.

Hailed as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, Heaney here shows once again that with subtle use of language, politics that is rooted in both the local and the universal, intelligence, humanism, and his love for nature, he can evoke in the reader feelings of immense transport that lead you from one terrain to another, from one landscape (both exterior and interior) to another, and from one state of mind to another. True poetry has the capacity to do all that, perhaps even more. When one reaches the last pages of this new collection, there emerges a sense of an overall balance that is both measured and spontaneous, a conviction that follows and explores the tenets of science as much as the arts.

Memory is permanence; permanence is imagination recalled, one that is indelible as well as porous. This is exemplified beautifully in the short poem. “The Strand”: “The dotted line my father's ashplant made / On Sandymount Strand / Is something else the tide won't wash away.” The “solid letters” of honor, classicism, remembrance, memory, and discovery, are all played out with an unerring and unstated irony in the poem “Remembered Columns.”

The solid letters of the world grew airy.
The marble serifs, clearly blocked uprights
Built upon rocks and set upon the heights
Rose like remembered columns in a story
About the Virgin's house that rose and flew
And landed on the hilltop at Loreto.
I lift my eyes in light-hearted credo,
Discovering what survives translation true.

When the actual Nobel Prize announcement was made declaring Heaney the foremost man of letters last year, he was away on a holiday amid the classical ruins in Greece. He could not be contacted immediately, and it was only when Heaney made a routine telephone call to his son in Ireland that he actually discovered his wonderful fate, something the rest of the world already knew well before the recipient himself. That a poem such as the one quoted alluding to all that was scripted well before actualization is one of many marvels and beauty of poetry.

My favorite piece in the collection is the five-part “Mycenae Lookout,” a poem that explores with pungent power the twentieth century's political strife and hostility, even though it only alludes to the situation by employing a transferred metaphor that uses ancient Greek mythology. Ultimately, however, Heaney's latest collection is a moving and human book, one that includes in its composition a plea for hope, for innocence, for balance, and to seek eventually that “bubble for the spirit level.”