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The 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.”
“Michael Longley is a great poet whose work will endure while the English language does.” — Donald Hall
“Longley has all the necessary gifts—precision, the celebrant’s tongue, and that touch of mystery that sets certain poets apart.” — George Mackay Brown
“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 Barry
About the Author
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned his degree in Classics. He worked as a schoolteacher in Dublin, London, and Belfast before joining the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, where he served over twenty years as Director for Literature and the Traditional Arts. He was married to the critic Edna Longley and has three children.
Michael Longley passed away at the age of 85 on January 22, 2025. Read his obituary here.
All events are listed in Eastern Time and Irish Standard Time.
