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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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"Irish poets learn your trade/Sing whatever is well made," Yeats thundered, a mandate to which Michael Longley has long proved equal. Love poet, mythologist, translator, and visionary, he dreams above all of an ideal peace but writes achingly of "history left ajar," of World War II's legacy and Northern Ireland's too-casual violence. In "The Ice-Cream Man" (from 1991's Gorse Fires), Longley draws one victim into his family's fold: "Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:/You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before/They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road/And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop...."
Longley's most recent volume, The Ghost Orchid, contains fewer direct accounts of the Troubles and a host of transformations. There are adaptations of "Ovid's lovely casualties," notably "Arachne" and "Perdix"--in which Pallas Athene turns the young Daedalus's nephew into a "garrulous partridge." She "dressed him in feathers in mid-air and made him a bird,/Intelligence flashing to wing-tip and claw." There are also seven Irished translations from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Home from battle in full armor, Hector is amused when the "nightmarish nodding" of his helmet terrifies his baby son. Two poems later, in "Ceasefire," an aged Priam makes peace with Achilles: "I get down on my knees and do what must be done/And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son." The son, of course, is Hector.
Longley has been called "a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders," and he does his best to balance tragedy with ecstasy in hushed love poems such as "Snow-Hole" and "Couplet": "When I was young I wrote that flowers are very slow flames/And you uncovered your breasts often among my images." Elsewhere, Longley commingles love and nature with less intensity but with no less awe or brilliance. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The finest contemporary Irish poet,
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This review is from: The Ghost Orchid (Paperback)
Michael Longley is unusual not only because he has the courage, in these ironic, post-modern days, to write with an intense lyricism. What is more unusual still is that this lyricism, this music, derives as much from the power and clarity of his thoughts as from the play of the sounds. For example, the first four lines of this poem about the sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland: Some people tried to stop other people wearing poppies/ And ripped them from lapels as though uprooting poppies/ From Flanders fields, but the others hid inside their poppies/ Razor blades and added to their poppies more red poppies.
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