Britain's oldest literary award, the Hawthornden Prize, has this year been won by an Irish writer. Belfast-born poet Michael Longley will be formally presented with the £10,000 prize tonight at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
His winning book, The Weather in Japan, which was published earlier this year, has been widely praised for its characteristic lyric grace, precision and elegiac wisdom, as well as for its stylistic and thematic diversity.
Longley (60) is well established as one of Ireland's leading poets. He is also one of the more elusive, moving as he does from war to love and friendship, to nature and the classical world. The Weather in Japan is his seventh collection, but it is also, more importantly, the third book in a remarkable sequence which began in 1991 with Gorse Fires, which broke a 12-year silence and won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. That collection was followed by The Ghost Orchid in 1994, another superb book, which includes one of his finest poems, the highly prophetic and entirely coincidental Ceasefire.
Another of his best works, The Butchers (in Gorse Fires), as magnificent as it is angry, addresses the political situation in Northern Ireland while drawing on classical parallels. Fathers and sons is another of his most powerful themes. As a nature poet, he has always been more engaged observer than idle romantic, and this reflects his artistic stance:
Its expression resigned, humble even, as if it knows
And doesn't mind when the man draws the first diagonal
In white across its forehead, from ear to eyeball,
Then the second, death's chalky intersection, the crossroads where, moments before, the legs stiffen and relax . . .
- from Death of a Horse,The Weather in Japan.
The winning book includes as personal a piece as The Waterfall:
If you were to read my poem, all of them, I mean,
My life's work at the one sitting, in the one place,
Let it be here by this half-hearted waterfall . . .
And another outstanding narrative poem of personal reflection and wider comment, The War Graves:
The exhausted cathedral reaches nowhere near the sky
As though behind its buttresses wounded angels snooze in a halfway house . . .
Awarded annually to the "best work of imaginative literature", the Hawthornden Prize dates back to 1919. Longley is joining an impressive list. Previous winners include Ted Hughes, Graham Greene, Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul and Colin Thubron. Although aimed at English writers, the Irish have done well. Sean O'Casey won it in 1925 for Juno and the Paycock. Six years later, Kate O'Brien won it, while William Trevor was awarded it for The Old Boys in 1965.
