‘The Magnifying Glass’ was written for For Fleur, a festschrift compiled by Janet Wilson and Rod Edmond (New Zealand Studies Network and University of Northampton); ‘Inlet’ for Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on her Work edited by Rachel Falconer (Edinburgh University Press); ‘Bookshops’ for Off the Shelf: A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse edited by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador).
‘Riddle’ was written for The New Exeter Book of Riddles, edited by Kevin Crossley-Holland and Lawrence Sail (Enitharmon); ‘The Sonnets’ for On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, edited by Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Bloomsbury).
‘Snowdrops’ was written for the inaugural Winchester Poetry Festival; and ‘Storm’ for Keep it in the Ground, an anthology of poetry on climate change, edited by Carol Ann Duffy for the Guardian.
Several of these poems have been published in two fine-art limited editions, with illustrations by Sarah Longley: Sea Asters and The Dipper’s Range (Andrew J. Moorhouse, Fine Press Poetry); and in a chapbook, Twelve Poems (Clutag Press).
Three oft-repeated glosses: townland is a rural term for an area of land that varies from a few acres to thousands; duach is a sandy plain behind dunes that affords some grazing; lazybeds are disused potato drills.
‘The Troubles’ was inspired by John Wilson Foster, one of Ireland’s most distinguished public intellectuals. The answer to ‘Riddle’ is gorse, whin, furze.
Some of these poems have appeared previously in Agenda, Archipelago, Freckle, Guardian, Irish Times, London Review of Books, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, Yellow Nib; and on RTE and BBC.
POETRY
No Continuing City
An Exploded View
Man Lying on a Wall
The Echo Gate
Poems 1963–1983
Gorse Fires
The Ghost Orchid
Selected Poems
The Weather in Japan
Snow Water
Collected Poems
A Hundred Doors
The Stairwell
PROSE
Tuppenny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters
One Wide Expanse: Three Lectures
AS EDITOR
Causeway: The Arts in Ulster
Under the Moon, Over the Stars: Children’s Verse
Further Reminiscences: Paul Henry
Selected Poems: Louis MacNeice
Poems: W. R. Rodgers
Selected Poems: John Hewitt (with Frank Ormsby)
20th-Century Irish Poems
The Essential Brendan Kennelly (with Terence Brown)
Selected Poems: Robert Graves
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College Dublin where he read Classics. He has published ten collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was awarded a CBE in 2010. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2007–2010. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.
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 HillAngel Hill