President Michael D Higgins
It is with the deepest sadness that I, like so many others, have learned of the death of Michael Longley. I regarded him as a peerless poet with at least three poetic lives. It is, however, the generosity of his heart, and the lovely cadence of a voice of love and friendship that I will most remember.
Michael Longley will be recognised as one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced, and it has long been my belief that his work is of the level that would be befitting of a Nobel Prize for Literature. The range of his work was immense, be it from the heartbreak of loss to the assurance of the resilience of beauty in nature.
In his poems, we find a quiet attentiveness to the vagaries of the human heart, its ambitions, its disappointments, its successes and failures, and above all its capacity for empathy. Michael worked to give space and actuality to the moral imperative that we must live together with forbearance, with understanding, with compassion and insight, and above all else, perhaps, with hope.
I think, in particular, of his magisterial poem Ceasefire, a poem which I have had the privilege to hear Michael read in person on a number of occasions.
I think for instance of when it was an honour to be present when Michael was conferred with the Freedom of the City of Belfast in 2015 and, in particular, when he read the poem in Áras an Uachtaráin in 2017 at an event attended by the then Prince Charles.
I think it is appropriate to quote the final two lines of that poem, which recall a classic reference in response to loss, which express the terrible and beautiful essence of what it is to forgive:
“I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”
Michael Longley worked for artists’ welfare and his company was treasured by us all. In the course of a distinguished career with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Michael worked to support, encourage and nurture creativity in the most generous and inclusive way possible.
May I send my deepest condolences to Michael’s wife, the scholar and writer Edna Longley, to his children and to all of his family, friends and many admirers across the world.
Robin Robertson
I knew and admired Michael Longley’s poetry before joining Secker & Warburg in the late 1980s, and so it was an honour to work with him on his books from Gorse Fires in 1991 until his new selected poems, Ash Keys, published last year to mark his 85th birthday. Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect. I remember remarking in Belfast – at the launch of Love Poet, Carpenter – a Festschrift marking his 70th – that generally the only editorial input that Michael’s books ever required from me was an ISBN number.
He was the last of the great Northern Irish poetry triumvirate. He and his close friends, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, were part of a loose, convivial and brilliantly disparate group of young Irish writers (including Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon) who met in Philip Hobsbaum’s Belfast Group in the early 1960s. The three men published their debut collections that decade and went on to become major international poets.
Michael was unusual for working in a number of modes and excelling in all of them: a love poet, nature poet and war poet. As the third, he linked Homeric Greece to the Somme and to the Troubles – which he lived through, in Belfast – believing that all wars are, in essence, the same war. He spoke truth to power, and spoke it beautifully.
[ Award-winning poet Michael Longley dies aged 85Opens in new window ]
Ian Duhig
I met Michael Longley 40 years ago when he taught an Arvon course with Paul Muldoon. Between the two of them, they hugely extended my understanding of what contemporary poetry can do, and although I always say Paul’s contribution was wit and genius, Michael’s was grace and magic. Surrounded as he was by a staggeringly-gifted generation, he nevertheless remained good-humoured and generous about the wealth of talent he could sometimes be a little lost in. We kept in touch and I met him in both Ireland and England, when I never failed to be impressed by his unique angle on what poetry can do in terrible times. I particularly admired him for staying in Belfast during the worst of it and it was only fitting that his poem Ceasefire showed how a classicist can rise to the contemporary urgent occasion when others were silenced by it. I know he has left many poems behind which I look forward to reading on publication: some comfort for us, if only a little to his grieving family and many, many friends.
Mick Heaney
The news of Michael Longley’s death has left our whole family heartbroken. Michael was one of my father’s oldest and closest friends, with whom he shared a deep poetic and personal bond. Not only was Michael a truly magnificent poet, he was a man of immense warmth, quiet integrity and impish humour: he was always a joy to be around. Ireland has lost one of its greatest writers, and we have lost a dear family friend. Our thoughts are with his beloved wife Edna, children Daniel, Rebecca and Sarah, and all his family.
Rosemary Jenkinson
Michael Longley was a grandmaster of the Belfast writing scene, but he was always highly approachable and carried that trademark mischievous glint in his eyes. He once told me how disappointed he was to be treated with so much reverence by the younger generation of poets at Queen’s University Belfast. “You just want to be one of the lads,” I said to him. “That’s exactly it!” he replied delightedly. I know from talking to Michael that he missed his “good friend” Seamus Heaney in his latter years, but it is his sense of high-spirited rebelliousness that will remain with me. One day, he told me he was busy writing scabrous poems in Ulster-Scots and chuckled as he confided, “I hope Nelson McCausland will come across them and be shocked.” He will be much missed.
Paul Muldoon
Michael Longley was a poet who was brilliantly exact in everything he did on the page. He was also exacting, notably in his demand that poets remain above the fray while being nonetheless forthright and fair-minded in their public utterances. He managed to combine being a masterful maker of verses and a moral force.
Seán Hewitt
Michael was a poet of the utmost grace who, through music and precise attention, made timeless lyrics of glimmering, understated elegance. His work is rich with birdsong and changing weather, attuned to the fragility of life and possessing a supreme eye for beauty. I turned to his poems for their clarity and their wide compassion, which made the world feel more alive, more immanent, and, in spite of everything, more full of hope.
Leontia Flynn
Michael was a wonderful poet - an old school giant and master craftsman. In particular, most heartbreakingly now, he was a wonderful elegist.
His work, which I love, was both Classical and intimate; it paid attention to small living things and large historical canvases; it was tender, sometimes quite strange, and touched with mystery. Michael was also a fighter. As an advocate for the art form and a practitioner he seemed tireless, travelling to read from his latest selected poems, Ash Keys, just a few months ago. As a friend, he was supportive, funny and often scurrilous. All day his most beautiful elegies have been getting mixed up in my head with his bawdiest anecdotes.
I was just very grateful for him and will miss him enormously.
Bernard O’Donoghue
Michael Longley was an unsurpassed writer of poems of nature, family and place – especially of Carrigskeewaun, the townland in west Mayo that he mythologised so resolutely. He was always a poet of the material world, never feeling the need of any kind of mystification. Yet looking back over his long and celebrated career, it can now seem that his Troubles poems are after all his finest and most important. Despite the charm and style of the much lauded late poems, nothing is finer than The Echo Gate in 1979 with its quiet but sure saluting of the victims of the terrible decade that ended that year. Longley was ready for his subject then, having proved his strengths in poems of angry compassion in his previous volume, especially Master of Ceremonies, about the heartless discarding and disowning of his intellectually disabled uncle, killed in No Man’s Land. Like Yeats after 1910, public exigency seems to bring out a latent power, even if neither poet had previously seemed to be primarily a public poet. The dead of The Echo Gate are unforgettable, especially in the series of poems called Wreaths: for instance Jim Gibson, The Greengrocer of the title of one of the greatest, saddest Christmas poems:
Astrologers or three wise men
Who may shortly be setting out
For a small house up the Shankill
Or the Falls, should pause on their way
To buy gifts at Jim Gibson’s shop,
Dates and chestnuts and tangerines.
The evocation of natural goodness is not easy, with the threatening trap of mawkishness that Longley never falls into. And he was careful not to overuse this measured elegiac note that he strikes so infallibly, always aware of the danger for the poet ‘in interesting times’ of exploiting suffering for artistic ends. But once his passionate anger at violence had been released, it remained a formidable weapon, for example in the terrible punitive story of another intellectually disabled man in Self-heal:
He was flogged with a blackthorn, then tethered
In the hayfield. I might have been the cow
Whose tail he would later dock with shears,
And the ram tangled in barbed wire
That he stoned to death when they set him free.
I may be giving an unrepresentative sense of a poet who has devoted so much expert care to the description of birds and flowers and the pleasures of home and family: a poet who has said that love-poetry is the centre of the enterprise. But I think the public realm was where Longley’s distinctive powers of expression and sensibility were honed. And it remained a potent medium, as in the unflinching description of the hideous scene of Odysseus’s revenge in ‘The Butchers’ which appeared so shockingly at the end of Gorse Fires in 1991, and which Longley linked to the particularly psychopathic group called The Shankill Butchers. His outspoken courage enabled him to stay in Belfast, to ‘live it bomb by bomb’ (as described in Derek Mahon’s poem for James Simmons), and it is what provides unchallengable credibility for the delicate poems and elegies. His great poem Ceasefire in 1994 is universally regarded as a major public poem. But it was the product of a practised humane sympathy which established him as one of the great poets of his time.
Gail McConnell
Michael was brave enough to write about the terror and trauma of the northern conflict and two World Wars with a tenderness of touch, always alert to the risks that came with the art of representation. He mourned the dead and surveyed the ruins, but his eye was always fixed on the available sources of light, cherishing light and life. In his great poem Edward Thomas’s War Diary, we find ‘light spangling through a hole / In the cathedral wall’. And it spangles still. His death is a great loss for poetry, for Belfast, and for literature on these islands and well beyond. He will be greatly missed.
Moya Cannon
At a birthday tribute to Michael Longley during Clifden Arts Festival, some years ago, one of the contributors referred to him as ‘an oak tree’ in the world of Irish poetry. The Oak Tree has fallen in the storm and we are much the poorer. But what a legacy he has left. He was the last, or almost last, of a great generation of northern poets who kept faith with human values in the face of dreadful hatred and violence. At a time of bitter rhetoric, poetry held fast and created a bridge between warring communities.
Who can forget the risk and impact of his Ceasefire poem in this newspaper at the time of the IRA ceasefire? Yet in his poems about his father he is true to the northern unionist memory of the first World War. He was one of the great Irish nature poets. ‘Birds, such heavenly bric-a-brac…kingfisher, kestrel, dodo, swan..’ populate his poems, as do levrets, otters, orchids and stars. Last November, during Dublin Book Week, he still sparkled in conversation with Olivia O’Leary. A classicist who wrote poems for babies and wrens, he was great fun and will be sorely missed.
Nick Laird
Michael was our foremost poet of love, of war, of nature, and his recent selected, Ash Keys, stands as an immense testament to a life dedicated to the craft, to singing whatever is well-made. In condensed and profound lyrics, a delicately subversive sensibility was always evident, and I can’t think of a poet who had a more productive late stage in his writing career. He just got better and better as the poems kept coming: I did an event with him in November, and the night before he sent me a dozen new and terrific poems to look at. It’s hard to believe that there’ll be no more Longley poems. He was one of the greats of modern poetry, and he will be missed.
Declan Ryan
I only met Michael once in person, when I was the straight-man for an event around his recently published New Selected at the LRB Bookshop in London (a recording was made available of his reading from across his work - I’m especially glad now). Trying to figure out what his audience – let alone myself – might most want to ask him over the span of slightly less than an hour about his body of work was a reminder of the range, scale and variety of his writing, from those sculptural, stanzaic early poems to the later imagistic, often familial, snapshots.
He’d called himself, in a previous interview, a “failed hermit” but was happy to be at large for his readers that evening. To lean on A Personal Statement, his writing seemed, always, to want to believe the evidence of its eyes, and grew out of a lifetime of close, concentrated – devoted, even – attention paying. He was a war poet, a love poet and a nature poet simultaneously – and in that sense shared something with Robert Graves, an enduring influence – but was always his own man, too, refining a voice, striving for clarity and simplicity, remembering to sing. The poem of his that means the most to me, Water-Burn, ends “we should have been doing more with our lives” It’s hard to think how he could have done more with his.
Vona Groarke
“If I knew where poems came from, I would go there,” he once said in an interview. In a publishing career spanning 60 years I think it’s fair to say he not only went there, but took up residence.
The three lines of The Design, (published in 1985, six years before Gorse Fires rekindled his output and stoked his reputation as one of Ireland’s leading poets), illustrate his trademark neatness and way of turning that neatness out, like a pocket, to a wider world:
Sometimes the quilts were white for weddings, the design
Made up of stitches and the shadows cast by stitches.
And the quilts for funerals? How do you sew the night?
A questioning poet, and a poet who knew how to work specific detail up into impressive resonance, his close observation of the natural world - together with his oblique but nonetheless potent engagement with the political landscape, and his much-loved love poems - sewed work of great delicacy and warmth into contemporary Irish poetry.
That he could write a poem of beauty might be, in the end, his most fitting memorial.
Colette Bryce
“Most poems are too long,” Michael would say. Most poems are too Longley, I’d reply, but the truth is most poems are not Longley enough. He joked that if some of the people who call themselves poets were tightrope walkers, they’d be dead.
One benefit of longevity – which for him brought an incredible late period – is that his work has already stood the test of time; it is indelible in the minds of all of us who looked up to him and took courage from his absolute commitment to the art. He wasn’t a teacher, he left that to the poems; but that high-wire, mysterious tension of his lines cannot be taught – it was his gift. In person he was full of wisdom and mischief, lit from within. “If I knew where poems come from, I’d go there,” was another of his great one-liners. I hope he’s gone there.
Susan McKay
Michael Longley was preoccupied with the need to write about war, and to do so responsibly, to tread carefully when it came to people who had already suffered great harm. He would speak about Primo Levi who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it for the rest of his life. “The most important thing he did was to remember,” he said. “To bear witness when memory was being obliterated.”
He deplored what he called “Troubles trash”, admired the “almost poetic precision and suggestiveness” of the Good Friday Agreement. Once during an interview, he told me about reading his poem The Ice Cream Man on the radio. The ice-cream man, to whose shop the poet used to bring his child, had been murdered, a victim of the Northern conflict. After the broadcast, Longley received a letter signed, “The Ice Cream Man’s Mother”, in which she thanked him and said she appreciated that someone outside of the family remembered her son. “Getting that stunning letter was one of the most important events of my life,” he told me.
In 2019 I asked him if he would read at the launch at the Irish Secretariat in Belfast of a series of podcast interviews I had carried out for Wave Trauma Centre’s Stories from Silence project. The interviewees were people who had lost a partner during the conflict. Those who had been murdered included a barman, a woman who’d been serving in a fish shop, a lawyer, a policewoman, a man who came out of a garage to serve petrol, a young journalist tweeting about a riot.
Longley replied to my invitation light-heartedly: “I’m happy to spout briefly - a few wee poems.” He and his wife, Edna, came. They were at ease. They chatted with people. They listened intently to a panel that included a woman whose husband was killed in 1989 and another whose partner, another woman, had been killed 30 years later, just months before the launch.
Then he spoke about how moved he was to be there, and he read. He believed that “elegies brim with the remembered liveliness of the dead. They are a celebration as well as a lamentation.” The elegies he read that evening stilled the room. Afterwards several people told me that they did not normally read poetry but that they had been amazed by the way his words reached deep into their personal sorrow.
He did not read Ceasefire that night. He told me he had misgivings about that poem, which was published in The Irish Times days after the IRA announced its ceasefire in 1994 and has become one of his best-known works. It might have been “a bit middle class, a bit presumptuous,” he said: “Who am I to say people should forgive?” He said he’d met a man a few days after the poem appeared who told him he had admired it, but he was not ready for it.
Longley wrote All of These People as “a corollary or a correction” to Ceasefire. This wonderful poem opens with the question, “Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war/ Is not so much peace as civilisation?” It goes on to tell the stories of people like those remembered at the Wave event, insisting, “all of these people were civilised”. And so too was the poet Longley, a sweet man, a generous soul, a bearer of witness.
Glenn Patterson
It is difficult even to begin to think of Irish poetry without Michael Longley, of poetry full-stop, difficult to think of Belfast without him: he knew us and wrote us, over more than 60 years, in all our moods and moments. One of the first times I met him was on the Lisburn Road, where I was living at the time, and off which Michael lived most of his life. He belongs properly to the whole island of course - the poetry-loving world - but as I sit writing this, looking down Claremont Street on to the Lisburn Road again, I think, with deep, deep gratitude, that he is forever written into every step of it.
Geraldine Mitchell
The Michael Longley I knew was the Mayo Michael, the Carrigskeewaun Michael who, in the good old days, you might meet in Charlie Gaffney’s in Louisburgh or, more often, with Edna around the Vineys’ convivial summer dinner table. Edna and Michael with Ethna and Michael. Excellent company for a homesick expat still living abroad and, as yet, a reader rather than a writer of poems.
When I think of Michael, two images immediately appear – one is of a returning migrant bird, the other of his cheeky schoolboy smile. The smile because I don’t think I ever knew a scowling Michael. He was always so deeply pleased to be back in Mayo, always interested in local news, ready with a snippet of gossip of his own or a witty, sometimes malicious, quip. He knew how to charm. And the bird because each summer we’d be on the lookout: Are the Longleys here yet?
When Michael gave a reading in Louisburgh just a couple of years ago he said it was the scariest he’d given. He had calculated that something like 40 per cent of his work was written in Carrigskeewaun, in his friend the naturalist David Cabot’s house. It was like reading to your family, he said, and that’s always unnerving. He said he found it easier to stand up and read to an audience of a thousand.
It pleases me that the portrait of Michael by his good friend the painter Jeffrey Morgan, which hangs in the Waterfront Gallery in Belfast, has Michael sitting in my very basic cottage in a green armchair I had rescued from a skip in Barcelona. It was the early nineties.
Today, 30 years later, I know how much he will be missed by both neighbours and friends. But he has truly put this wild and wonderful corner of west Mayo on the map forever. My deepest and most heartfelt sympathy goes to Edna and to all the family.
Eamonn Mallie
Michael Longley was blessed with talents and gifts in spades: what really made him such enjoyable company was his reverent irreverence: initially he told me, “I am an atheist”. Over dinner before Christmas he told us, “I am a Protestant atheist”, as always with that little mischievous smile drifting across his face. He also spoke about being a “sentimental disbeliever”. I loved this side of Michael who confessed to me: “If I am not an Irish poet what am I?”
In Burren Prayer, Longley plants his credentials firmly in this sentiment.
“Our Lady of the fertile rocks protect the Burren”. He was a big man with a big capacity to feel and to do the honourable thing. He stood his ground. He did not look over his shoulder. He followed his instincts. Life for him was not a game. In The Ice-Cream Man, he bared his teeth:
“Rum and raisin vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, perch.
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the Ice-Cream Man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.”
A Classicist, Longley knew the fundamentals of linguistic excavation and deployed that experience to shine his light into tomorrow.
Longley truly respected and promoted emerging women poets. He often told me Patrick Kavanagh’s A Christmas Childood was one of the best poems he had read. He rejoiced in Brendan Kennelly’s exuberance as a fellow student living and working together in a canning factory in England … I loved this picture from The Factory that he paints of Kennelly early in the morning: “Already the tubby rollicking broken Christ talking too much, drowning me in his hurly gush which makes the sound water makes over stones”.
On learning of Seamus Heaney’s death I went straight to Michael to let him know. He was clearly shocked, speaking about his loneliness at the loss of a “brother” poet. He admired the role being played by Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little Pengelly. He has always been an optimist. His celebrated poem, Ceasefire, is a celebration of Michael’s life too.
Martina Evans
Michael Longley’s great gift for poetry was rooted in the nature that he loved, that fine scientific attention to detail in poems such as The Linen Industry, which expressed the political as it swept to its romantic yet deathly ending. Or in The Fishing Party, which begins with two unforgettable lines, “Because he loves off-duty policeman and their murderers/Christ is seen walking on the shores of Lough Neagh…”
On the back of these lines come flying the bluebottles, painted ladies, sheep’s fur, all of the natural world that Longley loved. And poem brightens even further when these natural things are followed by the names of artificial flies, “Dark Mackerel…Coachman…Orange Grouse Barm”. Christ must love everything and so does this 10-line poem working its charm, affirming those famous words from Patrick Kavanagh, “naming is the love-act and its pledge”.
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