Böcker av Michael Longley

Published to coincide with his 85th birthday, Ash Keys looks back on the extraordinary career of the last surviving member of the triumvirate of poets that rose out of Belfast in the 1960s'A master in an old, great tradition'THE TIMES'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders'SEAMUS HEANEY, author of Death of a NaturalistThe title of Michael Longley¿s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem `Ash Keys¿. The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be an image for poems in search of their readers. This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley¿s unusual range as a lyric poet.It shows how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland¿s troubled present cohabit in these pages ¿ as do depth, wit and beauty. Longley¿s poems of the west of Ireland, which pivot on Carrigskeewaun, his `soul landscape¿, have also made him a pioneer of `eco-poetry¿.In 2022 Longley was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize for poetry, a major international prize. Announcing the award, the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome stressed `the contemporary relevance of his themes and their cultural implications¿, and said: `Longley is an extraordinary poet of landscape, particularly of the Irish West, which he observes with the delicate and passionate attention of an ecologist, and a tragic singer of Ireland and its dramatic history. But he has also addressed the seduction, conquest, and fascination of love, as well as the shock of war in all ages, the tragedy of the Holocaust and of the gulags, and the themes of loss, grief and pity.¿

**WINNER OF THE 2022 FELTRINELLI INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE ** 'One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars.' Sebastian BarryMichael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'. The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'. 'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery. This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.

*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.

Michael Longley's prose centres on poetry, even when he is writing autobiographically, or reflecting on war and memory. Readers of his poetry have lacked access to his aesthetic thinking. Sidelines fills the gap by assembling prose that ranges from his youthful poetry reviews, to the lectures he gave as Ireland Professor of Poetry.

A Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the YearWinner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prize Shortlisted for the 2017 Forward PrizeA remote townland in County Mayo, Carrigskeewaun has been for nearly fifty years Michael Longley's home-from-home, his soul-landscape.

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.

Michael Longley has been called 'one of the finest lyric poets of our time'. Longley's poetry combines intense concentration with remarkable variety. Longley's genres span love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires, verse epistles, poems that reflect on art and the art of poetry.

Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic and formal range, Michael Longley is widely regarded as one of the finest poets in these islands. There are no hard boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies.