Michael LongleyMichael Longley
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Biography
Poet Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. After reading classics at Trinity College, Dublin, he taught in schools in Belfast, Dublin and London. He joined the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1970, working in literature and the traditional arts as Combined Arts Director before taking early retirement from the post in 1991. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001.
His first collection of poetry, No Continuing City: Poems 1963-1968, was published in 1969, and the collection Poems 1963-1983 was published in 1985. There was a 12-year gap between the publication of The Echo Gate: Poems 1975-1979 (1979) and the acclaimed Gorse Fires (1991), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award. The Weather in Japan (2000), won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Belfast Arts Award for Literature. He is editor of 20th Century Irish Poems (2002).
Michael Longley was Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1993. He has written widely on the arts in Northern Ireland, contributing to magazines including Encounter and Phoenix and has written scripts for BBC radio. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of Aosdána, an affiliation of Irish artists engaged in literature, music and visual arts. He lives in Belfast with his wife, the critic Edna Longley.
His Collected Poems was published in 2006. In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Poetry for Ireland, and his inaugural lecture, A Jovial Hullabuloo, published in pamphlet form in the same year.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Poetry
Bibliography
Ten Poems Festival Publications, 1965
Room to Rhyme (with Seamus Heaney and David Hammond) Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1968
Secret Marriages: Nine Short Poems Phoenix Pamphlets Poets Press, 1968
Three Regional Voices (with Barry Tebb and Iain Crichton Smith) Poet & Printer, 1968
No Continuing City: Poems 1963-1968 Macmillan, 1969
Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (editor) Gill & Macmillan, 1971
Under the Moon: Over the Stars (editor) Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971
Lares Poet & Printer, 1972
An Exploded View: Poems 1968-1972 Gollancz, 1973
Fishing in the Sky: Love Poems Poet & Printer, 1975
Man Lying on a Wall: Poems 1972-1975 Gollancz, 1976
The Echo Gate: Poems 1975-1979 Secker & Warburg, 1979
Patchwork Gallery Press, 1981
Selected Poems Wake Forest University Press, 1981
Poems 1963-1983 Gallery Press (Dublin), 1985
Selected Poems: Louis MacNeice (editor) Faber, 1988
Gorse Fires Secker & Warburg, 1991
Poems 1963-1983 Secker & Warburg, 1991
Baucis and Philemon: After Ovid (illustrated by James Allen) Poet & Printer, 1993
Selected Poems: W. R. Rodgers (editor) Gallery Press, 1993
Birds and Flowers: Poems Morning Start Publications, 1994
Tuppeny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters Lagan, 1994
The Ghost Orchid Cape, 1995
Ship of the Wind Poetry Ireland, 1997
Broken Dishes Abbey Press, 1998
Penguin Modern Poets Volume 13 (with Robin Robertson and Michael Hofmann) Penguin, 1998
Selected Poems Cape, 1998
Out of the Cold: Drawings and Poems for Christmas (with Sarah Longley) Abbey Press, 1999
The Weather in Japan Cape, 2000
20th Century Irish Poems (editor) Faber and Faber, 2002
Snow Water Cape, 2004
Collected Poems Cape, 2006
Selected Poems/John Hewitt (editor with Frank Ormsby) Blackstaff Press, 2007
A Jovial Hullabaloo (pamphlet) Enitharmon, 2008
Prizes and awards
1965 Eric Gregory Award
1991 Whitbread Poetry Award Gorse Fires
2000 Belfast Arts Award for Literature The Weather in Japan
2000 Hawthornden Prize The Weather in Japan
2001 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry The Weather in Japan
2001 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
2001 T. S. Eliot Prize The Weather in Japan
2004 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Snow Water
2009 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) (shortlist - 'Visiting Stanley Kunitz')
Critical Perspective
‘Sir, if prose is a river, then poetry’s a fountain’, was Michael Longley’s only contribution to an undergraduate seminar on the Poetics as he recalls in a verse tribute to his old university in The Ghost Orchid (1995). What might in another context seem trite is, in Longley’s case, an accurate description of how his own poetry bursts from the mainsprings of language and feeling. It signals too, his gift as a lyric poet whose structural creativity and observational acuity have flushed out the conventionality of the lyric form, and brought it to a fresh set of engagements with traditional themes; nature and war, love and death.
Frequently described as one of the Belfast poetry ‘Group’ of the 1960s, Longley in fact owes more to the weight of English and classical tradition than to Irish antecedents or models. His acknowledged chain of influence extends from Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes to Louis McNeice and W. H. Auden, and before that to the poets of the First World War. From the classical literature he has pursued since undergraduate days, meanwhile, he derives both technical virtuosity and a deep well of allusion and paradigm. The ancient world provides him with a lens that refracts its modern counterpart, but which is itself suddenly illuminated by the passion and violence of contemporary society.
If his forms and perspectives derive from elsewhere, Longley turns to Ireland to express his attachment to nature. With the authority of the botanist or naturalist, he has drawn into his poetry the flora and fauna of Ireland, perceived with extraordinary precision. In early collections, botanical and ornithological sequences depict the plant-life or birds of the countryside with an imagist flourish, rooted in scientific security. The kingfisher, in ‘The Corner of the Eye’ becomes ‘a rainbow / fractured against / the plate glass of winter’, the corolla of the foxglove, in ‘Botany’, ‘a thimble, / Stall for the little finger and the bee’. In later work he continues to bypass the tame formalities of pastoral, evoking instead the companionship of wild creatures and plants in his beloved County Mayo, in the west of Ireland:
‘The leveret come of age, snipe
At an angle, then the porpoises’
Demonstration of meaningless smiles.
Home is a hollow between the waves,
A clump of nettles, feathery winds,
And memory no longer than a day…’ ('Remembering Carrigskeewaun')
Such intimate close-ups are a means of celebrating the natural world in all its perfection and diversity. But Longley’s engagement with nature also serves as a counter to his confrontations with urban life and the violence of his home city of Belfast. As a poet he has borne witness to the traumatic events of the Northern Irish Troubles, registering his outrage at paramilitary assassinations in journalistic poems such as ‘The Greengrocer’, or ‘The Civil Servant’. But where condemnation fails, he turns back to nature as a healing resource. In ‘The Ice Cream Man’, a murdered shopkeeper is offered a verbal wreath of Irish wild flower names: ‘Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica…’. Similarly in ‘The Fishing Party’, the poet composes for the off-duty policemen murdered on a fishing trip, a poignant litany; a list of the names of local fishing flies:
‘Dark Mackerel, Gravel Bed, Greenwell’s Glory, Soldier
Palmer, Coachman, Water Cricket, Orange Grouse, Barm…’
These evocative taxonomies lift the subject from barbaric to elegiac, giving the poet a means, perhaps, of absorbing – though not accepting - his community’s persistent violence.
In much of Longley’s writing, the Northern Irish conflict re-opens the deep wounds of previous wartime experiences. Several poems recall his father, who fought in two world wars, depicting him both as loved individual and as representative of a battle-scarred generation. Again, there is an attempt at healing through tribute, and through the redemption of love. In the dark comedy of ‘The Kilt’, the poet describes his father’s recurrent nightmare of stabbing a German soldier:
‘He had killed him in real life and in real life had killed
Lice by sliding along the pleats a sizzling bayonet
So that his kilt unravelled when he was advancing.
You pick up the stitches and with needle and thread
Accompany him out of the grave and into battle,
Your arms full of material and his nakedness.’
There are memories too of the battle of Somme in the First World War, its ‘cracked and splintered dead’ witnessed by proxy through Longley’s father (‘In Memoriam’), or linked in the poet’s mind to three teenage British soldiers and a bus driver, killed with brutal casualness during the early years of the Troubles (‘Wounds’). Like ‘Blitz’, which captures the suffering of Belfast during Second World War air raids in the image of dead children laid out in the city’s empty swimming baths, such poems rely on vivid, sometimes shocking detail, but serve to acknowledge the necessary place of death in the human imagination.
In Gorse Fires (1991), Longley’s poetry seems to change gear slightly, with looser metric and varied verse forms, but his allusion to classical antecedents - particularly Homer - remains central and pertinent. In this volume’s graphic poem ‘The Butchers’, for example, the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors by the returning Odysseus is reconfigured in language which adds a contemporary nuance, glossing the episode with uncomfortable familiarity. In The Ghost Orchid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses forms the basis of a teasing philosophical series on the animal and human world, but here too, Homer predominates. The collection includes a poem Longley published in an Irish newspaper on the eve of the IRA ceasefire of 1994. Entitled simply ‘Ceasefire’, it draws on Book XXIV of the Iliad - in which Priam goes to Achilles to ask for Hector’s corpse – to contemplate the agonising process of forgiveness and renewal. An understated poem, it resonates deeply with the collective feeling of a shattered community, and signifies Longley’s continued commitment to the filtering – though poetry – of real life in its harshest forms.
In his most recent collection, The Weather in Japan (2000), Longley chooses shorter forms, but pursues the contemplation of death and grieving introduced in The Ghost Orchid. Again his poetic landscapes cover a broad range, from Flanders to Auschwitz, but the emphasis throughout is on transcendent images which convey, like that of Homer’s horses weeping for Patroclus in ‘The Horses’, the twinned truths of love and suffering. And here, finally, is the resilient natural world once again – the fox, the hare, the seal – intimately realised, and offering consolation amidst the elegies and dark histories of the book. As in all Longley’s writing, a subtle lyric skill draws the collection together and charges it with his humane and instantly recognisable voice.
Eve Patten, 2002
Author statement
'I live for those moments when language itself takes over the enterprise, and insight races ahead of knowledge. Occasionally I have things to say, or there is something I want to describe. But these are not my main reasons for writing.'
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Jonathan Cape Ltd
Random House UK Ltd
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8539
Fax: +44 (0)20 7932 0077
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/
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Related links
http:/ / www.britishcouncil.org/ arts-literature-publications-and-resources-poetryquartetshome.htm
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