CityLife

MLF: The grand old man of Irish poetry

Micheal Longley

‘Their drift is remembrance.’

Seamus Heaney has called him ‘a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.’ He refers to himself as an ‘unreconstructed highbrow. The presence of Michael Longley at the Manchester Literature Festival this evening is a rare chance to see one of the giants of Irish poetry – and current Professor of Poetry for Ireland – perform his own work.  

Longley was born in 1930s Belfast and took his degree in Classics at Trinity College Dublin. This, and his involvement with Philip Hobsbaum’s ‘Belfast Group’ of the 1960s alongside contemporaries Heaney and Derek Mahon, has shaped the themes and form of his poetry.  

The characteristic elements include: his allusions to the classical stories of Homer and Ovid to lend an oblique significance to contemporary local events; carefully precise dissections of Irish flora and fauna to illustrate a theme; the elegiac and consolatory tones of his work; and his belief that poetry should be ‘polished, metrical and rhymed’, using a carefully controlled form as the foundation for ‘those moments when language itself takes over the enterprise and insight races ahead of knowledge.’  

His detractors have suggested that these recurring themes in his work lend themselves to contrivance rather than control. But in his best work, produced after a twenty year hiatus working in the business of the arts which saw him establish programmes in literature and traditional arts for the Arts Council Northern Ireland, he acknowledges this with a sly humour.  

‘A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea

Connoisseur as well as a poet…

Single-

Mindedly I scour my teapot and

Measure our some Silver Needles Tea,

Enough for a second steeping.’

(‘Snow Water)

His work from this time on includes Gorse Fires (winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1991); The Ghost Orchid (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award in 1995) and The Weather in Japan which won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2001.  

His best known, much anthologised poem ‘Ceasefire’ represents a culmination of all these elements. Published just before the 1994 IRA ceasefire, it uses the story of Priam and Achilles from Homer’s Iliad in a chillingly prescient call for the need for forgiveness in reconciliation.  

‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done

And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son’  

He is joined on stage by Kilkenny born Tom French, whose first collection ‘Touching the Bones’ was awarded the Forward Prize for First Collection 2002.  

Michael Longley will appear tonight, Monday 19 October, at 6pm at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama as part of the Manchester Literature Festival. For more information visit the links to the right of the page.