Collected Poems, by Michael Longley. 368pp. Cape, £25
Commenting on the obsessive culture of commemoration in Northern Ireland, the critic Edna Longley suggested that "we should erect a statue to Amnesia and forget where we put it". Her husband, Michael Longley, has his own relationship with amnesia: he has quipped that if he knew where poems came from he'd go there. As his handsome new
Collected Poems reminds us, he has been there, several hundred times over.
Longley is simultaneously the weightiest and most light-fingered of poets: as his dustjacket photos have charted down the years, he is part Hemingway, part Father Christmas, an unflinching tough guy one minute and handing out presents all round the next. Drawing on 35 years of published work,
Collected Poems has lived through important times and it clocks up its share of appointments with the public and private griefs of the Northern Irish troubles, most famously in the 1994 poem "Ceasefire". But it begins with playful moths in the small hours and ends with "a brain-rattling bramble-song inside a knothole".
The early Longley of
No Continuing City (1969) is a metaphysical poet with Philip Larkin's record collection and a fondness for cheery misfits such as Erik Satie and Walter Mitty. Addicted to tightly rhyming forms, he longs for a state of release too, "covet[ing] the privilege / Of vertigo", as he writes in his great set-piece ode "The Hebrides". Still in his early 30s, Longley showed great maturity in
An Exploded View (1973), already making the elegiac mode his own in poems such as "Wounds", "Alibis" and "Kindertotenlieder".
Also from this collection are the verse letters to his fellow Northern Irish poets James Simmons, Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney, poems whose talk of "poetic conservatives / In the city of guns and long knives" and "burnt-out houses / Of the Catholics we'd scarcely loved" did not always meet with the approval of their dedicatees (as described in Fran Brearton's authoritative new study from Bloodaxe,
Reading Michael Longley. This Bloomian anxiety of influence may have had a short-term disorienting effect on Longley, as his next collection,
Man Lying on a Wall (1976), is not without its share of anomie, but his fourth, The Echo Gate (1979), is a splendid return to form, including some of his very best poems ("The Mayo Monologues", "The Linen Industry" and "Peace").
Much has been made of Longley's publishing hiatus between
Poems 1963-83 and
Gorse Fires (1991) but, truth be told, eight years is an entirely reasonable period to take between books, especially if the writer comes back as refreshed as Longley did with a volume that brought a new focus and intensity to his work. The classical world, the west of Ireland, and a sequence on the second world war come together in poetry of rare historical and personal witness, as in the couplet "Terezin":
No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.
Longley's poetry has always had a strongly ceremonial bent, which finds a suitable outlet in
The Weather in Japan (2000), with the poet also showing himself increasingly haunted by the first world war, in which his father served. His decision to dispense with the virtuoso rhyming of his earlier work has seen him develop a blank-verse line of endless prosodic variety and suppleness. By the time of
Snow Water (2004), however, Longley's short poems on County Mayo, snow and war have begun to assume their exquisite contours with an ease that skirts self-parody.
Taken as a whole,
Collected Poems shows Longley struggling with the desire to inscribe natural and human landscapes of loss, and the sometimes conflicting demand that poetry comfort or even just cheer us up now and then. It is no surprise that the last line of an untitled quatrain at the back of the book contains the injunction to "tuck me in". In his truest and most enduring poems, Longley manages, in Yeats's words, to hold justice and reality in a single thought without doing violence to either. The many poems in which Longley succeeds in this aim are among the great poems of our time: Longley is the laureate of habitation, of the soul's native, adoptive and imaginary dwelling places, even if underneath it all "There's no such place as home", as he writes in "Check-up".
An early verse letter to Heaney ends with a description of "leaving careful footsteps round / A wind-encircled burial mound". Longley is among the most surefooted of poets, but
Collected Poems is no burial mound. in "Detour" he imagines his own funeral cortège taking a leisurely detour, while he wonders "where my funeral might be going next". The magnificent, decades-long conversation with the living and the dead that is Longley's poetry is too urgent to end any time soon.
