Michael Longley holds on his lap his lifetime’s work.
His wife, the academic and critic Edna Longley, suggested Ash Keys as the title for this latest collection of poetry, “because she likes that poem, and she thinks of them as a symbol of poems floating out on the wind and their air to find their readers.”
Longley liked it too: it had a “similar texture” to Gorse Fires, his best-known volume, and because a title should be “a kind of compass point for a poem, for a book”.
It is also a compass point for Longley’s life. Ash Keys: New Selected Poems, which is being published to mark the poet’s 85th birthday, on July 27th, brings together more than 50 years of poetry, from his first collection, No Continuing City, from 1969, to The Slain Birds, from 2022.
“It’s a summing up. It’s what I am most convinced by in my oeuvre,” Longley says, then immediately laughs at his use of the word. “I also wanted to touch on the things that have activated me, like the west of Ireland, like nature, like animals, like love, like sex, like politics, like the Holocaust, the first World War. I wanted to represent all of those, to be true to my preoccupations.”
All of these, and more, are represented in this slim, elegant volume, just as they are represented in the room in which we sit. Lined floor to ceiling in bookshelves – so much a feature of the house that he fears for the joists in the floors above – its every inch has been taken over by his passions, from nature finds to photographs of his seven grandchildren and the paintings that hang on the walls. “My daughter [Sarah] did all these pictures. She’s a genius.”
For most of that lifetime he has lived within a few kilometres of where he was born – “I love Belfast. I love the Lisburn Road” – yet he has made space for other loves, other places; for Carrigskeewaun, in Co Mayo, the “soul landscape” that has long inspired his poetry, and for Trinity College Dublin, where he studied as an undergraduate.
His eyes light up as he describes “getting to know Ireland, southern Ireland, via Trinity and the city of Dublin, and then visiting Carrigskeewaun for the first time in 1970, which really was the beginning of the most nightmarish period [of the Troubles] and realising just what a beautiful island we still live on”.
That first view of Carrigskeewaun, “from a curve in the road looking down, it was, as James Joyce would say, an epiphany, and I still gulp when I turn that corner … I stop the car and I just look at it. It’s like looking at a woman one loves. I knew that I didn’t really want to be anywhere else or go anywhere else.”
If Carrigskeewaun was an epiphany, Trinity was “a revelation … in the middle of a major city, a few minutes’ walk from coffee shops, pubs, bookshops, it was intoxicating”. Longley “more or less abandoned” his studies – he was reading classics – to write poetry. “I was writing several crappy poems a day. I filled notebooks.”
He also met his future wife, whom he first saw looking out of a window overlooking the university’s front square. “This black head went past.”
“That’s Edna Broderick,” his companion said. “They think she’s going to get the top scholarship.”
“I registered two things,” Longley says. “The black, raven hair, and that she was brainy, and one of the guiding things in my life has been intelligent women. Most men don’t like intelligent women. I just hang on their every word … We became an item, as they say, about 1960, and got married at the end of 1964.”
She has been the constant in his life. “People are sometimes a bit in awe of Edna. They don’t realise she has me in stitches most days, usually at my expense. She’s very, very funny. I don’t think I could be friendly or in love with anyone who wasn’t funny.”
Longley’s parents, Richard and Connie, were Londoners who moved to Belfast because of his father’s job. He was educated at Royal Belfast Academical Institution – “a very moderate school, Inst”. One of the cofounders was [William] Drennan of the United Irishmen, and it had a liberal enough past, but there was nothing about Irish history, Irish art, no Irish poems. We might as well have been living in Wolverhampton.
“Apartheid was what it was … The whole thing had been managed very well by the unionist hegemony and by the Catholic Church, who were insisting on – and still do – separate education, which meant that I had no friends who were Catholics, Northern Irish Catholics. So part of the inner adventure was getting to know Seamus [Heaney] and his fiancee, Marie Devlin – and, you see, they didn’t have any Protestant friends.”
What was this like? “It was awkward for me. In the late 1960s, early 1970s, I spent a lot of time as the liberal Protestant apologising, as though it was all my fault.”
Was this the beginning of understanding his Irish identity, of becoming an Irish poet rather than a Northern Irish one?
“I prefer to be called an Irish poet,” Longley says. “I’ve no doubt that I’m an Irish poet, or I’m nothing. I’ve been cheering for Irish teams since I was a teenager, 60 or 70 years, and I’ve never had a shadow of a doubt who I want to win, especially when they’re playing England.”
Yet alongside this Irish identity sits that inherited from his parents, who came to Belfast in 1927, who loved Ireland but never lost their English accents.
“My dad, who I think about every day … was at the Battle of the Somme, and he won the Military Cross for gallantry. They both loved Ireland. He was what you would call a working-class Tory. When the Tories got back in in 1951, I remember my dad saying, ‘We’ve got Winston back,’ … Going to Inst and then to Trinity and starting to read the New Statesman and The Irish Times and the Guardian, which is what I still read, my father didn’t quite understand.
“I feel Irish … Ireland has given me all the data out of which I make sense of life, and I think my soul would shrivel if I denied the Britannic side. In a way, Trinity helped us, and discovering the west of Ireland helped us.”
He felt “happy, happy in a very special way”, when the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998. “It was an extraordinary moment, deep down inside of me, and it meant I could be true to my British side. I could be true most especially to being Irish, and just as important I could be true to being neither or both.”
Longley’s first published poems were in student magazines at Trinity. An early poem, The Flying Fish, was published in The Irish Times in 1962; it was the first time he was paid for his poetry. “I got a cheque for £5.”
It opened the door to a decades-long relationship with this newspaper as a poetry reviewer and as an outlet for his poetry. “It might be one of the only papers in the world that recognises that poetry is news of a kind.”
In 1966 Longley reviewed a first volume of poems by “an impressive young Ulster poet”; the volume was Death of a Naturalist, and the poet Seamus Heaney.
Friends with Derek Mahon since Trinity, he got to know Heaney well when Edna got a job at Queen’s University and the Longleys moved back to Belfast. “We hit it off tremendously well from the word go, Seamus and I.”
The three became known as the Belfast Group of poets, but at the time they had only a “subliminal sense” that something special was happening. “The media talked about Northern poetry, but we didn’t actually think like that. We were just young poets, finding the words, developing our friendships, attending to our future careers,” Longley says with another laugh.
He emphasises the fun they had. “Derek was hilarious. That’s where all of the worship of Seamus is sort of ridiculous. We were also filthy-minded and funny and hilarious. We spent an awful lot of time laughing. We weren’t sitting like that” – he makes a gesture of mock thoughtfulness – “being profound.”
But their words were. “Those were very, very exciting times in the 1960s, when Heaney and Mahon and [James] Simmons and I were discovering ourselves, bringing out our pamphlets … It’s edgy, there’s competition, there’s support, there’s envy.
“When you’re in your late teens and early 20s, expressing yourself through poems, you are vulnerable, so in a way we supported each other and competed, and then the place was slowly imploding.”
He recalls a walk with Mahon up the Falls Road in August 1969. “Large bits of it were on fire, and we were completely – I was, anyway – flabbergasted by the ferocity of it, by the hatred, by the mutual hatred.” The “spotlight of the world’s media was on this trouble spot, and of course that illuminated in a dark way what was happening in the writing”.
Longley emphasises that it was something they were “reluctant to get engaged in, hitching a ride on yesterday’s headlines. Not to be exploitative, not to be impertinent and intrude on the suffering of fellow citizens, that seemed to me terribly important.”
Looking back, he says, “there aren’t that many Troubles poems … The phrase I used way back in 1971 was letting the raw material of experience settle to an imaginative depth where it can be transformed into art, so it took time.”
He gives the example of a favourite poet, Emily Dickinson, who lived through the American civil war. “I don’t think she mentioned it once, but it doesn’t mean that all of the tensions aren’t there between the lines.
“The image I quite like is of a whirlpool. I drove up Tate’s Avenue [recently] and every house, practically, has a UVF flag, so the tensions are still there. We have this cultural confluence, which is a blessing and a curse in some ways: there’s the Irish river flows into the Scottish one, which is very important, and the English one, and then the Anglo-Irish one, so you get this whirlpool.
“On the top, on the surface, you get creative activity, poems and paintings, but at the bottom there’s this dark pond of darkness that results in violence and has resulted in violence.”
Longley wrote his best-known poem, Ceasefire, shortly after the Provisional IRA ceasefire in 1994; it was first published in this newspaper. Taking its inspiration from the Iliad, it envisages the Trojan king Priam, who must plead with the Greek warrior Achilles for the return of the body of his son, Hector.
“It’s that magical thing which happens when you just sit down and dine with somebody,” says Longley.
“The episode in the Iliad is very modern, psychologically, because Achilles has had to suppress all his feminine side to be a great general, and when the old king, Priam, clasps his knees in supplication it awakens all of those suppressed nice sides, so it’s an astonishingly intense moment.
“At the end of it they’re both exhausted, emotionally exhausted, and you can just hear Achilles – ‘Fuck it, let’s have something to eat’ – and they sit down, and they break bread together and they look at each other and they think, yeah. That’s what happened with the Belfast Agreement.”
This year is the 30th anniversary of both the poem and the ceasefire that inspired it. “I think we’re getting there,” Longley says, “but it’s going to take a generation, and it’s going to take patience and it’s going to require everyone to lower their voices and to listen to each other and to get to know each other to never forget the victims and their families.”
He recently met Northern Ireland’s first and deputy first ministers, Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, at a poetry reading in Hillsborough Castle. “I was tremendously impressed by the depth of affection they clearly had for each other … It filled me with hope.”
He is “not much engaged with the constitutional question … I live in a united island.” For Longley, “the most important, most pressing political question is the future of the globe. If we don’t get our act together as coinhabitants of the Earth, we’re finished. We have to learn to revere and respect and make space for the other creatures that share the globe with us. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
Northern Ireland is, he believes, “quietly proceeding into the future, and that’s the way to do it. We’ve stopped bellowing at each other; we’ve started to use Christian names when we’re talking to each other – little things like that. We’ve started to smile.”
Belfast too is smiling. “There’s nowhere in the world as poetry-friendly as Northern Ireland, and generally as lively and literary a place. It’s astonishing – I just can’t keep up with it. It’s got something to do with the size of the city, but it’s this confluence, it’s this cultural commotion, which is what Belfast is in peacetime as well as in war.
“And there’s a legacy now of the poetry, and friendship. Belfast is a sharp-witted city; it’s a hilarious city. You can’t get above yourself for very long in Belfast.”
The “major blessing” in his life has been friendships with people such as the botanical artist (and fellow orchid enthusiast) Raymond Piper, the ornithologist and writer David Cabot, who introduced him to Carrigskeewaun, and the naturalist, writer and Irish Times columnist Michael Viney, and his friendships with the poets, above all Mahon and Heaney.
“Marie [Heaney] called me that last Saturday, the last man standing. I said, yeah, I’m beginning to suffer from survivor guilt. The thing is to keep going.”
Keeping going he is. “I still don’t know where the poems come from. They have to come to me. It’s an act of will … At the weekend I wrote three.”
After Ash Keys there will be another book, “in a couple of years”. He is in no rush; with 85th-birthday celebrations, he jokes, “the subtext is: just in case he doesn’t make it to 90”.
Does that not just mean an even bigger celebration for his 90th? Longley’s response is classic, self-deprecating Belfast: “You won’t be able to hear yourself for the cheering.
“There’s one of Seamus’s later poems called Keeping Going – wonderful poem – and I think that’s right. I’m keeping going. I’ve still things to say.”
Ash Keys: New Selected Poems is published by Jonathan Cape on Thursday, July 25th
