SOURCE: Hosmer, Jr., Robert Ellis. “Poetry Roundup.” America 177, no. 20 (20 December 1997): 23-9.

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...