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Acclaimed Northern Irish poet Michael Longley dies aged 85

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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."

Bernard O'Donoghue said: "Michael Longley was an unsurpassed writer of poems of nature, family and place – especially of Carrigskeewaun, the townland in west Mayo that he mythologised so resolutely. He was always a poet of the material world, never feeling the need of any kind of mystification. Yet looking back over his long and celebrated career, it can now seem that his Troubles poems are after all his finest and most important."

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

 

 

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Comments

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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

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David RL Moore

Thu 30th Jan 2025 08:48

Michael Longley was / is a wonderful poet. His reflections on Ireland speak with pure authenticity.

I first became aware of him when I was living in Northern Ireland and trying to get my head around the place. In my experience artists of all kinds are a good place to start. I read Heaney, Yeats, Muldoon...then I happened across Longley and wondered why it had taken me so long to find him.

My favourite poem of his is "Wounds" which speaks of generational trauma and the futility of war. It shook me when I read it, as it was at a time of much tit for tat murder in the sectarian slaughter that was and is almost dismissively referred to as "The troubles"

Wounds (1973)

Here are two pictures from my father’s head —
I have kept them like secrets until now:
First, the Ulster Division at the Somme
Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’
‘No Surrender!’: a boy about to die,
Screaming ‘Give ’em one for the Shankill!’
‘Wilder than Gurkhas’ were my father’s words
Of admiration and bewilderment.
Next comes the London-Scottish padre
Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick,
With a stylish backhand and a prayer.
Over a landscape of dead buttocks
My father followed him for fifty years.
At last, a belated casualty,
He said — lead traces flaring till they hurt —
‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’
I touched his hand, his thin head I touched.

Now, with military honours of a kind,
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
A packet of Woodbines I throw in,
A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Paralysed as heavy guns put out
The night-light in a nursery for ever;
Also a bus-conductor’s uniform —
He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers
Without a murmur, shot through the head
By a shivering boy who wandered in
Before they could turn the television down
Or tidy away the supper dishes.
To the children, to a bewildered wife,
I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.

Poem © Michael Longley 1973. Source: An Exploded View by Michael Longley.

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