<p>This is Michael Longley’s own selection from thirty years of writing. It reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work, which has been celebratedin Britain and Ireland, but also in the United Statesfor its lyric intensity, metaphysical wit, and thematic and formal range. Includes selections from No Continuing City (1969), An Exploded View (1973), Man Lying on a Wall (1976), The Echo Gate (1979), New Poems, Gorse Fires (1991), and The Ghost Orchid (1995).</p>

Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

LONGLEY, Michael

Poetry

JONATHAN CAPE.

Michael Longley’s Snow Water follows his highly acclaimed The Weather in Japan to prove that he is one of the best nature poets in English: a poet who can rightly claim the paradoxically liquid crystal snow water” as a metaphor for his own imagination. Yet, living in Northern Ireland, Michael Longley is a nature poet turned into a war poet as if / He could cure death with the rub  of a dock leaf,” as he writes in Edward Thomas’s Poem.”  Longley cherishes the natural world, the words associated with it, and the perspective which dwelling in the five elements has revealed to his tender, patient mind. The imperatives of the subjective world resound in every sacramental detail of the landscape. Even in the elegies, eulogies and friendship verse, Longley’s ability to find the right natural image with which to communicate his fellow feelings is striking; for example, he compares the poems of the late Michael Hartnett to the skylark’s / Chilly hallelujah, the robin’s autumn song.” And so it is with the rest of the poems on a multiplicity of subjects; Longley’s discrete ministrations invite us to capture our own little cumulus of exhalations.” Literature and the land are seen throughout as a form of shelter for the inner life, for here it may be explored.  With cover artwork by Michael Longley’s daughter, Sarah

Snow Water

History & Criticism

The poems collected in Snow Water find their gravity and centre in Michael Longley's adopted home in west Mayo, but range widely in their attention - from ancient Greece to Paris and Pisa, from Central Park to the trenches of the Somme. Meditations on nature and mortality, there is a depth and delicacy to these poems, a state of lucid wonder, that allows for the easy companionship of love poem and elegy, hymns to marriage and friendship and lyric explorations of loss. Though the embodiment of these themes is often found in the wildlife of Carrigskeewaun and Allaran Point - the plovers and oystercatchers, whooper swans and snow geese, the hares and otters, the marsh marigolds and yellow flags - Snow Water is emphatically a celebration of humanity. These are all, in a way, poems of love and kinship - even the magnificent sequence that links the horrors of the Great War with those of the Trojan War, and with all the wars between. What Longley says of Edward Thomas might easily be said of him: 'The nature poet turned into a war poet as if/He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf'. Full of intensity and grace, tenderness and wisdom, these are poems of deceptive simplicity from a craftsman of international stature.

Collected Poems

Michael Longley has been called “one of the finest lyric poets of our time.” His Collected Poems, the work of forty years, displays a brilliantly sustained achievement, whose depth, beauty and wit can now be fully appreciated.

Essays & Correspondence

The collected works of one of the finest lyric poets of our time. Longley's genres span love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires and translations from classical poets. Seamus Heaney has called him "a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders."

Collected Poems Limited Edition (leather)

Michael Longley has been called “one of the finest lyric poets of our time.” His Collected Poems, the work of forty years, displays a brilliantly sustained achievement, whose depth, beauty and wit can now be fully appreciated.From the Hardcover edition.

Gorse Fires is an unusual artistic blend: darkly austere, yet abundant in images, catalogues and syntactical virtuosity. Longley’s versions of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and ‘Ghetto’ – based on the polish ghettos – epitomize his concern with the meaning of home and family.

Gorse Fires

Michael Longley has remarkable powers of reinvention. Certain themes remain constant - the natural world, war, violence, love, friendship, art, death - but they also keep changing because the forms and genres of his poetry never stand still. In A Hundred Doors a sinuous short line complements his variations on pentameter and hexameter. And Longley's interlacing of individual lyrics, so that a diverse collection seems a single poem, intensifies in the shadow of mortality. A sequence about his grandchildren's births is counterpointed by elegies, including Longley's continuing elegy for the Great War dead. The Mayo townland, Carrigskeewaun, with its cast of leverets, otters, swans, wrens, lesser twayblade and bird's-foot trefoil, also takes on fresh guises. Longley is among Europe's foremost 'ecological' poets. Yet Carrigskeewaun is ultimately symbolic, a microcosm, a 'soul-arena'. A Hundred Doors roams in time and space. The title-poem evokes the oldest Byzantine church in Greece: Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. The remains of a Greek temple 'ache' beneath its floor. Wild orchids, which crop up in Greece and the Italian Garfagnana as well as Ireland, are among the collection's multiple 'doors'. Others are music and paintings, 'cloudberry jam from Lapland', a Shetland pony. This is work of power, precision and delicacy: poems that 'bend and magnify the daylight', poems by a master craftsman.

A Hundred Doors

In his 75th year, the tenth collection by the greatest living Northern Irish poet.Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry PrizeIn The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence – both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin’s death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word ‘stairwell’ is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and ‘homeland’. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

The Stairwell

A collection of poetry which uses Ireland for a starting point or implied focus. It is an Ireland often sighted through disturbing perspectives derived from foreign cultures such as Homer's "Odyssey", World War II and the Holocaust. This is the winner of the 1991 Whitbread Prize for Poetry.

Secker Warburg

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LONGLEY, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by LONGLEY, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LONGLEY, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Selected Poems

Snow Water

Snow Water

Collected Poems

Collected Poems Limited Edition (leather)

Collected Poems

Gorse Fires

A Hundred Doors

The Stairwell

Gorse Fires