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Angel Hill
Shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection
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 colors. 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.
“In his poems of the natural world, Longley is still a master of miniatures: there is an astonished, almost shortsighted intensity to the way he looks at what lies around him, in his familiar Carrigskeewaun habitat as well as in the Scottish locales this collection also visits.”
— John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
“His is a poetics of perpetual return and recognition—seeing again and afresh—that is never grounded in one place.… Unafraid to capture the intimacies and specifics of this life, Longley is also one of the very few poets able to take us, time and again, to a place as ‘Wild and melodious’ as the birdsong he celebrates.”
— Fran Brearton, The Guardian
The Candlelight Master
“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 / More intensely with every year.” The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures. His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date, too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots “Hochmagandy.” Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley’s Carrigskeewaun.
“…With more than 50 years of publishing behind him Longley has built up a monumental legacy of his own. Yet burnished though these poems are, they remain teemingly alive.”
— Aingeal Clare, The Guardian
“His is a poetics of perpetual return and recognition—seeing again and afresh—that is never grounded in one place.… Unafraid to capture the intimacies and specifics of this life, Longley is also one of the very few poets able to take us, time and again, to a place as ‘Wild and melodious’ as the birdsong he celebrates.”
— Fran Brearton, The Guardian
“These poems feel mortal, and tender…”
— John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
About the Author
One of twins boys, Michael Longley was born in Belfast to English parents, Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. He was the Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010, a cross-border academic post set up in 1998, previously held by John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Paul Durcan. He was succeeded in 2010 by Harry Clifton. North American editions of Longley's work are published by Wake Forest University Press.
Photo by Andrew Hill
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