The Poetry of Michael Longley

Nuala Ní Dhomhnail included Michael Longley’s ‘Ceasefire’ in her choice of ten representative poems of the 1990s in Irish poetry in the following terms: ‘it made its first electrifying appearance in print in The Irish Times to coincide with the announcement by the IRA of the first Northern Ireland ceasefire. . . its effect was dynamic, and rippled right through the community, both North and South, having a galvanising effect that can only be imagined of some lines of Yeats, perhaps, at the turn of the century’. His status as a poet resident in Belfast throughout the ‘Troubles’ has been of talismanic importance over the last three decades. Just as significantly for his open outlook, his ‘home from home’ in Carrigskeewaun in the West of Ireland has been the inspiration for a rich and luminous body of lyric poetry where what he sees as his basic themes of love and death are broached via a naturalist’s intimate involvement with the elemental processes of the physical world. In his latest volume, The Weather in Japan, winner of the 2000 Hawthornden Prize for ‘best work of imaginative literature’, Italy and Japan further extend the geographical and cultural co-ordinates within which his poetry finds its moral and aesthetic realisation. This new collection continues the remarkable resurgence in Longley’s career during the 1990s, marked by the lyric intensities of Gorse Fires (1991) and the more unruly lyric energy of The Ghost Orchid (1995). These volumes consolidate Longley’s position at the forefront of contemporary Irish poetry.