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Amazon.com's Price: $15.03 as of 03/21/2010 08:29 EDT
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780571178223
ISBN: 0571178227
Label: Faber and Faber
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: October 08, 2001
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Studio: Faber and Faber
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com 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.
Product Description:
A collection of poems from the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. The poems discover the possibility of a new beginning in many subjects and circumstances. Private memories, classical scenes and humble domestic objects are endowed with talismanic significance and friends and relatives are invoked for their promise and steadfastness.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (FSG, 1996)
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 ... Read More
Rating: -
I wish I could say I liked or understood these poems more than I do. Seamus Heaney is a Nobel- Prize winning, and most highly regarded poet. This volume is the first which appeared after he received the Nobel Prize. The 'spirit level' is a reference to a carpenter's tool used to level things off. The collection is supposedly built in one sense around the idea of 'balance', material and spiritual balance.
The first thing that struck me about the poetry is the richness of its vocabulary, the frequency ... Read More
Rating:  -
Well, with the exception of a few quality lines like those in Cassandra, Whitby-sur-Moyola, and At Banagher, I'd have to say that the Spirit Level was (sad to say), for the most part, a waste of my time. But, instead of bashing it totally, I'll point out a few significant lines that I enjoyed and kept me from giving it one star.
From Cassandra:
"No such thing as innocent bystanding... no such thing as innocent."
From Whitby-sur-Moyola:
"...Unabsorbed in what he had to do/ But doing it perfectly, ... Read More
Rating: -
It is very easy to automatically compare Seamus Heaney with WB Yeats: they are both Irish, they both write about Irish legend and the Irish landscpae, yet the similaritiues stop there. In the first publications of poems from Heaney since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature he deals with subjects which strike a chord of sincerity for his reader, as was the case in many of his earlier poems, but this latest work is more stylistically controlled. This does not mean that he stays within a more limited framework, on ... Read More
Rating:  -
Seamus Heaney has never shied away from the fact that poetry is craft as much as art- a duality neatly exemplified by the title of his latest collection.For Heaney, poetry itself is the spirit level, the tool with which balance is found, whether that balance be between his hatred of the troubles dividing Ireland and his own ambivalence about his role in them, or between the pleasures of reminiscence and the uncomfortable responsibilities of adulthood that transform reminiscence into idyll.
The sensuality ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780571178223
ISBN: 0571178227
Label: Faber and Faber
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: October 08, 2001
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Studio: Faber and Faber