Published: 15 October 2007
ISBN: 9780224080446
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 368
RRP: $29.99

Categories:

Literature: history & criticism

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Collected Poems

Michael Longley

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'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' - Seamus Heaney

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.

Published: 15 October 2007
ISBN: 9780224080446
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 368
RRP: $29.99

Categories:

Literature: history & criticism

Share…

About the author

Michael Longley

Michael Longley has received many awards, among them the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 Longley received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed a 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.

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Praise for Collected Poems

Collected Poems is vital...and reminds us that Longley is not only a lyric poet of the first rank, but a clear-sighted observer who knows the real world when he sees it, even as he knows that it cannot be grasped, only celebrated, or interrogated, or mourned - which is to say, given its due - as it passes.
John Burnside, Irish Times

A wonderfully capacious book, at once stringent and delicate.
Andrew Motion, Observer Books of the Year

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless...he is a master in an old, great tradition.
Elaine Feinstein, The Times

Michael Longley's Collected Poems delineate a 40-year achievement whose scale can now be appreciated.
Roy Foster, Irish Times Books of the Year

Michael Longley's Collected Poems brings together in one beautifully designed volume the work of this marvellous poet, reminding us, if we needed reminding, of the authority of his voice and the beauty of his line.
John Banville, Irish Times Books of the Year