Gerard Smyth writes: War poet. Love poet. Nature poet. Elegist. Witness to the ‘Troubles’ and what in one poem he calls ‘the stereophonic nightmare / Of the Shankill and the Falls’. Michael Longley had a superb capacity to invent variations on his themes, and each became intrinsic to his art. The sustaining element across his range of genres is the lyric power with which he addresses them, producing poems of lucidity and freshness. The Longleyesque touch that distinguishes the best of his work is perhaps to be found in the composure of the language, the weaving together of its delicate strands.
Robert Graves, a writer admired by Longley, defined a good poem as ‘one that makes complete sense, and says all it has to say memorably and economically; and has been written for no other than poetic reasons’. It is not hard to imagine that Longley shared that conception of what a good poem should be. In the quest for his own good poem nothing but the precise word would suffice.
As Ash Keys, a selection published last year and spanning the entirety of his career reminds us, he had already achieved mastery of form with formally accomplished poems while still in the first flush of his writing life, his unique stance evident in exceptional poems such as ‘Leaving Inishmore, In Memoriam’ (a poem foreshadowing the many war poems to come later) and the title poem of his debut collection, No Continuing City, a volume brimming with the poet’s self-assurance. From early to late poems in Ash Keys, there is a pattern of continuity and unity, not just in subject choices but also the distinct cadence of his lyrical voice.
What he referred to as the ‘mincing machine’ of the Great War cast its shadow over the poet’s familial background and in turn provided the dynamic for many poems, including ones that reimagine his father’s traumatic war experiences. If Heaney’s bog poems were a device to guardedly deal with the ‘situation’ in Northern Ireland, Longley too found a form to serve a similar purpose: ‘I see my great war poems as oblique comments on the Troubles …’ he once declared, citing ‘Wounds’, a poem in which he draws an analogy between a vision of his father’s Somme ‘landscape of dead buttocks’ and the commonplace domestic setting in which a murdered bus conductor has
… collapsed beside his carpet slippers,
Without a murmur, shot through the head
By a shivering boy who wandered in
Before he could turn the television down.
Like his Belfast neighbours who lived with the menace of sectarian killings, he could only ‘Look sorrow in the face’, as he puts it in ‘Troubles’, a short poem concluding with the only possible verdict:
Call those thirty years
The Years of Disgrace.
Throughout those three decades Longley gave us solemn poems that take the human cost of the Troubles as their subject. He never had any desire to cultivate an epic voice and in his elegies for the victims keeps to an understated, personal idiom, as in ‘The Ice Cream Man’, with its statement of brutal fact – ‘They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road’ – juxtaposed between a list of ice cream flavours and a catalogue of wild flowers – a Longleyesque perspective that amplifies the note of lament. In a later poem, ‘All of These People’, he reminds us again that the ice-cream man’s ‘… continuing requiem / Is the twenty-one flavours children have by heart’. The poem, in remembrance of other victims also, goes on to ask
Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation?
…
Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised?
All of these people, alive or dead, are civilised.
He was a poet who could read the mind of war – his father’s Great War experiences led to an abiding interest in the war poets, from Homer to Edward Thomas – and peace when it came. His noble sense of the duties of the poet to memorialise has its apotheosis in his response to the August 1994 ceasefire, in the simply titled ‘Ceasefire’, a poem with the immediacy of breaking news and for which he found his metaphors in Greek tragedy.
I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.
This was not the only time his classical reading was used with such proficiency. With that closing couplet, a stroke of ingenuity and the poet’s moment to serve history, he forged an unforgettable image to depict the triumph of peace over conflict.
The Portuguese poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, over whose work Homer also presides, believed that ‘without mythic thought, man is unable to inhabit the world’. Longley would seem to have agreed, believing
… the best war memorial
Is in Homer: the two horses that refuse to budge
Despite threats and sweet-talk and the whistling whip.
( ‘The Horses’)
The Greek myths fuelled so much of his repertoire and in a succession of poems he refreshed those myths, particularly in the flow of volumes (Gorse Fires, The Ghost Orchid, The Weather in Japan) that not only marked a fertile return in the wake of a long lull in his writing life but also the beginning of a greater public profile as he emerged from years of silence in full command of a reinvigorated voice.
He will of course be remembered for the profusion of poems in praise of the natural world, the vitality of its small creatures and ‘birds of heaven’, its flora and fauna, represented on the page with the kind of delicacy we might associate with the meticulous impressionist detail of a Japanese watercolour. Like John Clare in the poem ‘Journey Out of Essex’, he was immersed in
… the biographies of birds
And the names of flowers
His nature poems possess a wonderful sense of composure – ‘I slow down the waterfall to a chandelier’, he writes in one poem. His slowing down, stilling of time, allows us to hear in these mediations the fluent voice of an observer on high alert:
The weasel and ferret, the stoat and fox
Move hand in glove across the equinox.
I can tell how softly their footsteps go –
Their footsteps borrow silence from the snow
Those lines from the lovely early poem ‘Persephone’ are characteristic of a lyrical tenderness that is well matched by his penetrating way of seeing things, picking up what might go unnoticed. Longley the nature poet seemed to find virtue in the things of nature, the wildflowers ‘bordering his journey’.
It has been said that ‘no place is a place until it has had a poet’. The Mayo landscape, and in particular his beloved Carrigskeewaun, the locus of many fine poems, got lucky when Longley made it his idyll and retreat and he became its poet, holding it up to us as the place where
Home is a hollow between the waves,
A clump of nettles, feathery winds,
And memory no longer than a day
When the animals come back to me
From the townland of Carrigskeewaun,
From a page lit by the milky way.
(‘Remembering Carrigskeewaun’)
A sensual love poet, he was without inhibition when it came to intimate detail. I once heard him say that the supreme form of love poem was the elegy, a form for which he consistently could find the necessary ‘heartbroken words’, whether in the public or private sphere – the latter giving rise to the magnificently moving sequence for his twin brother Peter.
He knew the effect of economy and the dangers of verbosity. The brief, darting poem became Longley’s forte, the kind that might look dainty on the page but carries notes of full strength. However condensed they may be, his short lyrics are abundantly visual.
Some critics have found his work ‘particularly hard to place’, as Jody Allen Randolph put it, citing him as ‘a poet apparently influenced by offbeat introverts …’ There is probably no better understanding of Longley’s aesthetic than the one provided by his great friend Brendan Kennelly, who said: ‘His sense of wonder at the thereness of things, at the fact of the facts of existence, is the source and substance of much of his poetry.’
Gerard Smyth is the author of ten volumes of poetry and several chapbooks, including The Haunted Radio (Bridgehorse Editions, St Paul, Minnesota ) published in 2024.
