Ash Keys

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless... A master in an old, great tradition

Times

Michael Longley is a great poet whose work will endure while the English language does

Donald Hall, author of Ox-Cart Man

Longley has all the necessary gifts – precision, the celebrant’s tongue, and that touch of mystery that sets certain poets apart

George Mackay Brown, author of Magnus

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, author of Old God's Time

His poems rest on the page like driftwood, seasoned and made beautiful by an ocean of experience

Helen Dunmore, author of Ingo

Michael Longley’s poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience

James Fenton, author of Yellow Tulips

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

Seamus Heaney, author of Death of a Naturalist

This new selection of his [Longley’s] poetry, drawing on his 13 published collections, shows his range and power. He is one of the great poets of landscape, as well as a powerful, pained commentator on Northern Ireland’s troubled history

Herald

With Ash Keys we gain access to the past and relive its colour… Now, more than ever, Longley’s work deserves to be widely read and treasured

Sunday Times

Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first

Times Literary Supplement

Ash Keys…reminds us of the consistent yet varied empathies express throughout this great poet’s finely wrought lyrics

Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Ash Keys confirms his [Longley’s] standing as one of the most compelling and luminous poets writing today

Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Michael Longley thinks like no one else, and the resulting poems replenish your senses and bring you home to yourself

Observer, *Books of the Year*

As I've grown older and calmed down, I find myself spending deeper time with the brilliance of work I might earlier have hurtled past… more recently Michael Longley too, in his beautiful Ash Keys

Andrew McMillan, Guardian