The Spirit Level

Seamus Heaney

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.