Walking on air

In a lecture given in America in 1988, Seamus Heaney remarked how his fellow Ulster poet, Paul Muldoon, who had recently moved to the States, had severed himself so completely from his origins that he had "achieved the poetic equivalent of walking on air". This made Muldoon's state seem rather precarious; yet there was a note of envy, too. For Heaney's own early reputation was founded (through poems like "Digging") on the exact earth of his rural upbringing in Co Derry; and his career since has coincided with events in Northern Ireland (though he moved to the South in 1972) that conferred their own local obligations.

This dual burden has not been borne without occasional protest. In North (1975), Heaney figured himself "weighing and weighing / my responsible tristia"; in Station Island (1984), the ghost of James Joyce urged him instead to "Take off from here", "Let go, let fly"; in Seeing Things (1991), wearying of a "poetry / sluggish in the doldrums of what happens", he called for a "lightening" of the heart, and indeed began "to credit marvels"; until, in his Nobel lecture, delivered in December, he was finally able to liken his own situation to "walking on air". And this was not, as it sounds, just the new laureate's casual expression of delight, but a modest declaration of the imaginative freedom he claims these days for himself and his poems.

The phrase would already have been in place in one of the poems printed now in The Spirit Level, his magnificent and mould-breaking tenth collection, where he makes his own rules to stand with one foot in the soil and another in pure music:

So walk on air against your better judgement

Establishing yourself somewhere in between

Those solid batches mixed with grey cement

And a tune called "The Gravel Walks" that

conjures green.

Here, where he writes of being challenged by one of his "tribe" on a train to Belfast, "When, for fuck's sake, are you going to write / Something for us?", he answers, "if I do write something, / Whatever it is, I'll be writing for myself". This exchange occurs, moreover, in a poem called "The Flight Path", which ends on a French mountainside and with a symbol of gravity defied: "And somewhere the dove rose. And kept on rising."

The starting-point of most of the poems is earthbound and familiar enough. "To a Dutch Potter in Ireland" is composed of "slabbery, clabbery" clays, as palpable as anything he ever dragged readers' boots through. "Tollund" revisits the site of a distinctive early poem " Tollund Man" from Wintering Out (1972) - the first in his series about northern European "Bog People"; but as the new poem, written in the spring of hope at the ceasefire, has it, "Things had moved on". And though the place may feel purged of its poetry by peace, by "user-friendly" tourist development, the poet and his notional companions now seem to float free of their situation:

Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning

And make a go of it, alive and sinning,

Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.

The tools, toys and implements of his father's cattle-farm still provide much of the book's furniture: a sharping stone, a swing, an old sofa, a whitewash brush, a trowel renewed by use, "its edge and apex always coming clean / And brightening itself by mucking in". This last phrase is nearly synonymous with "Weighing In", a poem which mocks its author's fastidious balancing acts ("Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes"); but it is the opening section of that poem, where the "life-belittling force" of a 56lb weight is made light of, whether the metaphor is sexual exchange or political equipoise, that stays in the mind: "Yet balance it // Against another one placed on a weighbridge ... / And everything trembled, flowed with give and take."

As the physical laws are thus flouted or overcome, sex itself, in the beautiful poem "The Walk", is ushered into elements of fire and air. The middle-aged poet and his wife are as

Two flames in sunlight that can sear and singe,

But seem like wisps of enervated air,

After-wavers, feathery ether shifts ...

Yet apt still to rekindle suddenly

If we find along the way charred grass and sticks

And an old fire-fragrance lingering on,

Erotic woodsmoke, witchery, intrigue,

Leaving us none the wiser, just better primed

To speed the plough again and feed the flame.

The other principal novelty of The Spirit Level comes from Heaney's recent absorption in classical literature. The centrepiece is a ferocious Homeric sequence called "Mycenae Lookout". A watchman, posted to observe the raw dawn of peace after the return of Agamemnon from Troy, glimpses a future in which "a man / Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran / Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down" - a poignant emblem of the coming confusions of civil war. The lookout, burdened with destructive knowledge, tongue-tied and equivocal "beyond bad faith", compares himself to "Atlas, watchman's patron, / ... up at all hours, ox-bowed / under his yoke of cloud / out there at the world's end": in both, we know from the Nobel lecture, Heaney is expressing something of his own former uneasy vigil, the sense of being

some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect.

Heaney's art has always been exemplary in this kind of self-knowledge; and the subtlety and stealth of it, even when confined to the farmyard, have made the best attempts at appreciation look ponderous. But he is unlikely to say for himself what the new dimensions explored and strange delights suspended in The Spirit Level make us feel afresh: that if any poetry being written today can have this "redemptive effect" - as Heaney in his critical writing has begun to claim it can - then his is it.