Search results for ""author michael longley""

A Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the YearWinner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prize Shortlisted for the 2017 Forward PrizeA 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 colours. 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.

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Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry PrizeShortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot PrizeIn The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence – both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin’s death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word ‘stairwell’ is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and ‘homeland’. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

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Michael Longley (Author) Michael Longley's thirteen collections have received many awards, among them the Whitbread Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he and his wife the critic Edna Longley live and work. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime's achievement.Paul Muldoon (Foreword By) Paul Muldoon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fourteen full-length collections of poetry, including Howd

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Michael Longley has been called 'one of the finest lyric poets of our time'. In assembling the work of forty years, his Collected Poems displays a brilliantly sustained achievement whose depth, beauty and wit can now be fully appreciated. Longley's poetry combines intense concentration with remarkable variety. The formal and thematic range laid down in No Continuing City (1969) has undergone a series of rich metamorphoses up to Snow Water (2004), and the two poems included here as an epilogue. Longley's genres span love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires, verse epistles, poems that reflect on art and the art of poetry. He has extended the capacity of the lyric to absorb dark matter: the Great War, the Holocaust, the Northern Irish 'Troubles'. His poetic landscape intermingles Belfast (where he lives), western Ireland, Italy, Japan and Homeric Greece. Longley's superb translations from classical poets (such as 'Ceasefire', which greets the IRA ceasefire in terms of the Iliad) speak to contemporary issues while activating the deepest sources of European poetry.

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In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their introductions, the selectors offer a passionate and accessible introduction to some of the greatest poets in history.Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907 and educated at Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. For most of his working life he was a writer and producer for BBC radio. His death in 1963 was sudden and unexpected.

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Michael Longley’s prose centres on poetry. This is so, even when he is writing autobiographically, or reflecting on war and memory, or enthusing about music and painting. Since Longley writes relatively little criticism, readers of his poetry have lacked access to his aesthetic thinking. Sidelines fills the gap by assembling prose that ranges from his (often-combative) youthful poetry reviews, to the lectures he gave as Ireland Professor of Poetry. Among the poets Longley discusses are Homer, Propertius, Louis MacNeice, Robert Graves, James Wright, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ruth Stone. Sidelines, which includes interviews with Longley, not only illuminates his own work. Longley’s perspectives on modern poetry are both distinctive and important. He is also uniquely qualified to interpret the phenomenon of poetry from Northern Ireland. Cover Image: My Father in the Cottage, Sarah Longley

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**WINNER OF THE 2022 FELTRINELLI INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE ** '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 BarryMichael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'. The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'. 'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery. This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.

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*AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR*'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.

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Brendan Kennelly was one of Ireland’s most popular and prolific poets. Over five decades he wrote thousands of poems published in over 30 books of poetry, including three previous editions of Selected Poems. Published on his 75th birthday, this new selection presents just over a hundred of Kennelly’s most essential poems, with a QR code giving readers access to an online album of readings by Brendan Kennelly of many poems from the book. The e-book with audio edition incorporates the same recordings. The Essential Brendan Kennelly has been edited by two lifelong admirers of his work. Like Kennelly, Terence Brown studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he taught until 2009; he is now Fellow Emeritus of the college. Michael Longley, who also studied at Trinity College, went on to become one of Ireland’s leading poets and was Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2007-10. Terence Brown & Michael Longley write (from their foreword): 'Brendan Kennelly is a poet of rare gifts, who at all stages of his career has written distinctive, memorable and powerful poems. We hope that this selection will allow readers to appreciate anew, or for the first time, a body of work that ranges from tender lyricism to the bleakest despair at the human condition, from bawdily comic narrative to the pleasingly epigrammatic squib, from mythic consciousness to social satire… Yet each literary mode – the lyrical and its obverse, a reductively satiric assault on "the poetic" – shares what has seemed the basis of all of Kennelly’s poetry: a quest for authenticity of emotion undertaken with high moral intent. In each, as Beckett said of the painter Jack Yeats, the poet "stakes his being".’ The audio selection draws on four classic recordings made by Brendan Kennelly in Dublin in 1982, 1998, 1999 and 2002 of 32 individual poems as well as four extracts from his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain. ‘Ten years ago Terence Brown and I edited for Bloodaxe Books a selection of his poems, The Essential Brendan Kennelly: a labour of love. We delighted in bringing into sharper focus the lyric grace of his genius, its rage and its rapture. To our relief Brendan gave our choices the thumbs-up. It remains for me one of the best things I’ve ever done. I loved and revered the man and his words.’ – Michael Longley, The Irish Times, paying tribute to Brendan Kennelly

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Two poets, a playwright and a novelist – Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Frank McGuiness and Anita Desai – explore in these essays aspects of the imaginative process as each has experienced it: four major writers, four sensibilities, four ways of seeing creativity and its contexts. MICHAEL LONGLEY writes with remarkable candour of his years – 1970 to 1991 – as arts administrator in Northern Ireland. Transforming anecdote into parable, this noted poet measures the cost of ‘trying to remain true to yourself facing the ”dark tower”‘ while being part of an essential but often soul-destroying bureaucracy. EAVAN BOLAND, merging the personal and the theoretical, contends that the place of women as writers in Irish society have been shaped by a ‘ fusion of the national and the feminine’. FRANK MCGUINESS, the internationally acclaimed playwright, offers a radically innovative reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, while calling into being the material contexts of creativity – in this instance, a prison cell. The Indian novelist ANITA DESAI looks at her country’s colonial heritage and a shared background that gave rise to the work of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the film-maker Satyajit Ray. Her fascinating lecture shows how a vibrant indigenous culture, coming into fruitful contact with the West at the end of the nineteenth century, blossomed into artistic creation – yielding parallels with Ireland.

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'I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.'Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.'Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.

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Helen Lewis' acclaimed memoir, A Time to Speak (Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1997), tells the story of the first thirty years of her life in Czechoslovakia, from childhood to her professional training as a choreographer and dancer. It also contains her devastating account of Nazi persecution, of loss and suffering in the Holocaust: Helen came very close to death. Maddy Tongue now completes the story of this extraordinary woman who overcame unimaginable suffering to become a creative force in Ireland. The author's friendship with Helen lasted for more than fifty years. As a dancer she performed in many of Helen's significant works. Shadows Behind the Dance describes Helen's creative approach, her struggle to overcome an Irish indifference to modern dance, her pursuit of perfection and her unshakeable belief in humanity. In Ireland today the presence of modern dance owes much to her innovative teaching and practice. Shadows Behind the Dance is supplemented with Chris Agee's 2002 interview with Helen, "An Irish Epilogue", and a folio of Holocaust poems and drawings by Michael Longley and Sarah Longley (who was a pupil of Helen's). Helen's sons, Robin and Michael, have also written a Foreword. The book has been generously funded through subscription by family, friends, colleagues and admirers of the unforgettable Helen Lewis.

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‘… the universal poet, servant of the medium, renewer of the forms, discoverer of the nugget of harmony in the language of ourselves.' Seamus Heaney 'He brings to Irish poetry an invaluable chronicle of mixed allegiances and lost worlds of the ambiguities of the colony and the defeats of victory. No one else has quite had his themes; no one else has quite ventured on his enquiries.' Eavan Boland Edited, with a new introduction, by acclaimed poets Michael Longley and Frank Ormsby, 'Selected Poems' is a testament to John Hewitt’s remarkable literary legacy, and a celebration of a unique, compelling and still urgent voice in 20th century Irish poetry.

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