Small delights and horror

In the past Michael Longley has been sceptical about his Selected Poems. In an interview with Peter McDonald in 1998 he declared his Poems, 1963–83 “premature”. The process of selection encouraged a self-consciousness and retrospection that proved disorientating for the poet (who was only in his mid-forties when the collection was published), and the acclaim that came with it threatened to overawe him. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has taken a firm line on praise ever since: “you accept [it], but you don’t inhale”. With Ash Keys: New selected poems, published to coincide with Longley’s eighty-fifth birthday, the time is right for retrospection, and for the kind of reflection that has ever allowed him to evolve as a poet.

Ash Keys bills Longley as the last surviving member of the triumvirate of poets who rose out of 1960s Belfast, but at times his associations and affinities with Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney have obscured his own singular achievement. He vied with Mahon for publication in the student magazine, Icarus, at Trinity College Dublin, and later was part of Philip Hobsbaum’s Belfast Group (in which Heaney was quickly hailed as the rising star). This “coincidence of talent”, in Longley’s description, was an auspicious beginning, but it was not for the faint-hearted. His early poems, perhaps as a result, are acutely aware of their own ambition. In “A Personal Statement” he aims for self-assertion (though not without thought for his competitor and closest friend; the poem is “for Seamus Heaney”). Longley addresses his own “Mind” but in the punning plea of the poem’s close, “Believe my eyes”, he anticipates the startling range of his own lyric voice, the various “I”s of his creation. The poem both strives for self-possession and seeks to undo the poetic self that it creates. In “The Hebrides”, “for Eavan Boland”, he simultaneously “fight[s] … for balance” and “covet[s] the privilege of vertigo”.

If the dedications of these early poems (Mahon, Heaney, Boland, Paul Muldoon) threaten to read as a cosy roll call of Ireland’s literati, the effect is lessened in later work. As the Troubles intensified, the need for friendship was keenly felt. Far from the somewhat cloistered context of Hobsbaum’s coterie, the men struggled in “the sick counties [they] call home”. In his verse letters to Heaney and Mahon, Longley worries that their art is confounded by conflict. “And did we come into our own”, he asks grimly, when tracing an “imaginary Peace Line / Around the burnt-out houses” and through the “back alleys of Belfast?”

Longley has long resisted the title of “Troubles poet”, with its sensationalist, unsettling implication of a connection between talent and tragedy. But as Northern Ireland convulsed with conflict, violence became increasingly unavoidable in his work. In “Wounds”, Longley’s poem for his father who fought in the First World War, the Troubles are refracted through the prism of personal loss. In “The Butchers” they are mirrored in mythology, with Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors. At times, however, Longley is circumspect about these poetic strategies. In “Fleance” he is a Shakespearean actor, an “illusionist” who escapes the spotlight of “history”, only to find Banquo with “a hole in his head” in the digs; brutality waits in the wings. It is an accomplished poem that aches for absolution for its artfulness.

And for a while this art apparently abandoned Longley; he published little from 1979 to 1991. Ash Keys records a kind of reticence to his return, a tact necessitated by trauma. The open-palmed ordinariness of an elegy such as “The Ice-cream Man”, which lists ice-cream flavours and wildflowers, or the haunted “silence” of the “hundreds of violins … hung in unison” in “Terezín”, suggests that “poetry is shrinking almost to its bones” (“Age”). The specificity Longley finds in this sparseness links his elegies to his love poems. He describes his lover on a mountainside in County Mayo and the sectarian murder of a civil servant with the same devoted, determined detail. If this attention is a measure of adoration, it is also a mainstay against atrocity.

He remains attuned to the world’s minute delights and repulsed by the scale of its horror. His grief has become more intimate (elegies for his twin brother and for Heaney), his joy more domestic (poems for his grandchildren). Even here he veers towards the vast, urgent questions of tragedy: “How can you murder millions and not know?” (“Primo’s Question”). His recent poems frequently end on this interrogative note: “what’s next?” in “The Walk”; “At spring tide where will my soul be going?” in “Wreck”. Just as he reaches a figurative finish line, there is a bolt back to the expanse of the blank page, the stretch of Carrigskeewaun beach, the darkness of the unknown. Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first.

Philippa Conlon has written for The Irish Times, Prospect and the Oxford Review of Books, where she is Editor-in-Chief

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