Acclaimed Northern Irish poet Michael Longley dies aged 85
The multi-award-winning poet Michael Longley has died at the age of 85. Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and lived in the city until his death, which was announced on Thursday. In the late 1950s he moved to Dublin to study at Trinity College and there, in the company of fellow student poets, including Derek Mahon and Brendan Kennelly, he became immersed in poetry.
At Trinity he met his future wife Edna - later a professor at Queen's University Belfast and a notable critic and writer in her own right. After their marriage in the mid-1960s they settled back in Belfast, where Longley joined other young poets who met to read and talk about each other's work. The Belfast Group - as it became known - included Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and others. They met in pubs near Queen's University and at the flat of a university lecturer, Prof Philip Hobsbaum.
"It was no way a back-scratching coterie," Longley later recalled. "The routine would be you'd go for a pint, and you'd have a poem in your pocket. And after a pint or two you'd venture to show it to, say, Seamus or Derek." After Heaney's death in 2013, Longley wrote an elegy called ‘Room to Rhyme’ about his friend, which was published in his later collection, Angel Hill.
His debut collection No Continuing City included the poem ‘In Memoriam’ written in memory of Longley's soldier father Richard, who had been wounded in the first world war and later died of cancer. He wrote a number of poems about the war, and in 2014 he took part in a reading at Winchester poetry festival to mark the centenary.
Longley had remained in Belfast as the Troubles worsened, writing a number of collections of poetry while working full time for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Trips to the west of Ireland prompted poetry about nature, but he did not avoid writing about the conflict. Poems like ‘The Ice Cream Man’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Kindertotenlieder’, ‘The Linen Workers’ and ‘Dusty Bluebells’ reflected the suffering of victims of violence.
In a later article for the New Statesman magazine, Longley wrote: "We disliked the notion that civic unrest might be good for poetry, and poetry a solace for the broken-hearted. We were none of us in the front line." In 1994, he wrote arguably his best-known poem, ‘Ceasefire’, inspired by classical allusion and an IRA declaration.
Ireland's president Michel D Higgins led a number of tributes published in the Irish Times, saying: "Michael Longley will be recognised as one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced, and it has long been my belief that his work is of the level that would be befitting of a Nobel Prize for Literature. The range of his work was immense, be it from the heartbreak of loss to the assurance of the resilience of beauty in nature.
"Michael worked to give space and actuality to the moral imperative that we must live together with forbearance, with understanding, with compassion and insight, and above all else, perhaps, with hope. I think, in particular, of his magisterial poem 'Ceasefire', a poem which I have had the privilege to hear Michael read in person on a number of occasions."
Robin Robertson said: "Michael was unusual for working in a number of modes and excelling in all of them: a love poet, nature poet and war poet. As the third, he linked Homeric Greece to the Somme and to the Troubles – which he lived through, in Belfast – believing that all wars are, in essence, the same war. He spoke truth to power, and spoke it beautifully."
Ian Duhig said: "I particularly admired him for staying in Belfast during the worst of it and it was only fitting that his poem 'Ceasefire' showed how a classicist can rise to the contemporary urgent occasion when others were silenced by it. I know he has left many poems behind which I look forward to reading on publication: some comfort for us, if only a little to his grieving family and many, many friends."
Longley received a number of awards, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the TS Eliot Prize, the Feltrinelli International Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Griffin international poetry prize, and the PEN Pinter Prize. He was appointed CBE in 2010 and awarded the freedom of his native city in 2015 for his contribution to literature and cultural life.
A TV documentary last year reflected the inspiration that Longley took from the landscape and wildlife of Carrigskeewaun in County Mayo, which he regularly visited. In the documentary he said whenever he finished a poem he celebrated with a dance - "whoopee, whoopee" - before calling his wife Edna to cast her critical gaze over his work for a bit of constructive feedback, adding: "Nine times out of 10 they're good suggestions."
PHOTOGRAPH: BBC
Greg Freeman
Sun 2nd Feb 2025 07:28
Thanks for posting this, David. You're right. Michael Longley is very much a first world war poet, as well as being a poet of the Troubles