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A Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the Year Winner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prize Shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize A remote townland in County Mayo, Carrigskeewaun has been for nearly fifty years Michael Longley’s home-from-home, his soul-landscape. Its lakes and mountains, wild animals and flowers, its moody seas and skies have for decades lit up his poetry. Now they overflow into Angel Hill, his exuberant new collection. In addition, Longley has been exploring Lochalsh in the Western Highlands where his daughter the painter Sarah Longley now lives with her family. She has opened up for him her own soul-landscape with its peculiar shapes and intense colours. In Angel Hill the imaginations of poet and painter intermingle and two exacting wildernesses productively overlap. Love poems and elegies and heart-rending reflections on the Great War and the Northern Irish Troubles add further weight to Michael Longley’s outstanding eleventh collection. Angel Hill will undoubtedly delight this great poet’s many admirers.
*AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR* 'I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certainty.' So wrote Maria Johnston, reviewing Longley's previous book Angel Hill. Yet The Candlelight Master does not only face into shadows. The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter. Other poems about painters - Matisse, Bonnard - imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says: 'We gaze on our soul-landscapes /...
Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize In 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 bui...
"Michael Longley has been called 'one of the finest lyric poets of our century' (John Burnside). This study is the first full-length assessment of his work, and looks in turn at all the major collections he has published over the past 40 years, and at the extraordinary growth of his reputation and influence." "In this book, Fran Brearton draws on letters, manuscripts, published and personal interviews with Michael Longley, as well as on his memoir, Tuppenny Stung, and his recent researches into his father's military career. She shows how his poetry is shaped by the dislocation and tensions of his English parentage and Irish upbringing, making him one of the most imaginatively various and formally inventive poets writing today."--BOOK JACKET.
Michael Longley's life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe where love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violence. This is Longley's own selection from 30 years of writing.
Poetry and Peace explores Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space.
Emerging, as it did, after over a decade of silence,Gorse Fireshad an immediate and resounding impact - revealing a poetry that seemed renewed and re-energised - and winning the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1991. It is now regarded as the pivotal book in Michael Longley's distinguished career. If Ireland remains Longley's starting-point or implied focus, it is often sighted through disturbing perspectives that derive from foreign cultures, from Homer's Odyssey, from the Second World War, and from the Holocaust. Even his beautifully precise poems about the West of Ireland are shadowed by the many destructive forces ranged against the creative act. Longley's versions of Odysseus' return to It...
A collection of poetry from the Irish poet whose last book "Gorse Fires" won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Whether writing about Sissinghurst, Japan, Buchenwald or Belfast, Longley speaks with delicacy and passion about love and loss, life and death. This is a limited edition of 100.
The Great War in Irish Poetry explores the impact of the First World War on the work of W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice in the period 1914-45, and on three contemporary Northern Irish poets, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley. Its concern is to place their work, andmemory of the Great War, in the context of Irish politics and culture in the twentieth century. The historical background to Irish involvement in the Great War is explained, as are the ways in which issues raised in 1912-20 still reverberate in the politics of remembrance in Northern Ireland,particularly through such events as the Home Rule cause, the loss of the Titanic, the Battle of the Somme, the Ea...