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Life and background
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 to English parents. His early education was typical of a Northern Irish Protestant, and for his third level education he chose to read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he established a reputation as one of a number of Northern Irish poets who were speaking with a new voice. Among the other "Ulster Poets" of that time were Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.
His first volume of poetry No Continuing City (1969) was well received. Though his work matured greatly in later volumes, even in his earliest poems it was clear that he had a highly disciplined style and that he was a fine craftsman of formal poetry. In his later volumes he began to address such issues as the political and social troubles in Northern Ireland and to ponder ever more deeply the meaning of artistic identity. Many regard "The Echo Gate" (1979) as his most important collection. In it, Longley displays a markedly deeper awareness of the emotional life than in his earlier work.
Longley worked as a school teacher in Dublin, London and Belfast but from 1970 to 1991 he work mainly for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is married to the critic Edna Longley and they live in County Mayo.
Commentary
Michael Longley is a poet of keen observation with a great sensitivity to the world around him, both human and natural. The poems on this course reflect some of the major concerns in his work, dealing with such subjects as the interplay between humans and the natural world, father-son relationships, and the realities and consequences of war.
His love of nature and his deep sense of belonging there are captured in Carrigskeewaun. Although the landscape of County Mayo is bleak and isolated, he feels connected to its mountains, walls and lakes and to those who have lived there before him.
He approaches this landscape, where he and his family are at home, with reverence and awe. He is aware, however, that the relationship between humans and nature is not always so harmonious. He offers a stark contrast in Badger between the nocturnal creature, silently managing "the earth with his paws", and the man-made diggers that plough the land and leave destruction in their wake.
This human potential for destruction and cruelty finds another expression in Mayo Monologues - Self Heal. Here we gain an impression of a rural society where ignorance and prejudice reveal themselves in a terrible brutality. A mentally retarded boy is "flogged with a blackthorn" for an innocent act that is misinterpreted, and the violence visited upon him seems all the more awful when it takes place in such an idyllic rural setting.
But Longley is no stranger to violence and he treats of it in many of his poems with particular reference to the Troubles in the north. In Wounds, he explores the grim realities and the far-reaching consequences of war. Whether it is in the trenches of the First World War where his father fought, or in the streets and homes of Belfast, war is always violent and undignified. Like the diggers in Badger, war is another human machine that wreaks havoc and destruction.
Nowhere is this more poignantly captured than in Wreaths, where ordinary lives are shattered and whole communities devastated by violent killings. In this poem written in the late 1970s at the height of the atrocities taking place across Northern Ireland, there is little to find solace in.
A hopeful chord is struck, however, when Longley writes sixteen years later, in Ceasefire, of the possibility of some kind of peace. In this free translation of an episode from Homer's Iliad, old enemies Achilles and Priam achieve at least an uneasy reconciliation. For both of them this means compromise. Priam must swallow his pride, "kiss Achilles' hand" and beg for his son's body. And Achilles must allow himself to be affected by Priam's grief. A ceasefire in Ireland, Longley seems to say, will demand similar compromise from both communities and a recognition of one another's grief.
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