Collected Poems
Michael Longley Jonathan Cape, 346pp, £25
Some poets are forever messing with their poems, trying to make them better. Or perhaps less bad. Think of W H Auden, for example, and the way he fiddled with, and then summarily rejected, his elegy written in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. The Northern-Irish poet Michael Longley, who has been publishing collections of poetry for almost 30 years, does not belong to that company, as he tells us in his introduction to this new edition of his collected poems. Such an act of unwise tinkering, he tells us, "resembles denting cold metal that was red-hot in another life".
There is another good reason why Longley should have chosen to desist from meddling with his early poems. He has not grown into something that would have been virtually unrecognisable to his younger self. There is a remarkable consistency of tone and subject matter in this book from first to last.
In a way, this is quite surprising. As a poet who, like his friends and coevals Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and others, was growing to maturity through the anguished years of the Northern Irish troubles, he witnessed and wrote about some terrible things. And yet, amid all those assassinations and that tit-for-tat terror, the way he chose to write about them - his obliquity, his graceful, singing line, the shapely complications of his syntax - somehow manages both to incorporate and to acknowledge violence, while at the same time annealing it. This does not mean that Longley is yet another hyper-sensitive poet thrust into a violent world. He is tougher and altogether stranger than that.
His voice is often quiet - much of his poetry is a version of pastoral, a celebration of his rural retreat in County Mayo that approaches, at times, a kind of near-mystical absorption. He is, to quote one of his own poems, a lover of otherworldliness. He writes about the minutiae of the weather; he gives us entire litanies of words that often consist of nothing more than the names of flowers, birds, trees, clearly relishing such list-making for the sake of the sheer mellifluousness of it all; he is a passionate observer of bird-life. He often writes the tiniest of poems - the merest glance of a glance, tinier than the tiniest of haikus.
Longley is often at a strikingly odd angle to his subject matter, both passionately committed to it, and strangely set apart from it. Dreams seem to mingle easily with memories. He is preoccupied by death but he often approaches the subject with a kind of fantastical, comic ghoulishness. One of his most striking poems of the 1970s, "The Linen Workers", which concerns the massacre of ten such workers, is knitted together by its repeated references to teeth and dentures - Christ's molars; his own father's dentures; the dead workers' teeth spilling on to the street, along with the detritus of their miserable lives - blood, food particles, bread, wine.
This is a strategy he frequently adopts - a sudden, bizarre shift from the quietly ruminative to the outlandish. His poems often consist of multiple acts of remembering, one layered upon another. He observes and interprets the present through the prism of the Greek and Roman classics. In the aftermath of the IRA's declaration of a ceasefire, he wrote a poem, published in a collection of 1979, called "Ceasefire", which registered the momentousness of that decision, but with characteristic obliquity. It retold an incident from the Iliad in which Hector confronts Priam, having just slain his son Achilles. The victor and the father of the vanquished effect a strange reconciliation in front of Priam's dead son.
This confrontation is like many of Longley's poems: jarring - and yet strangely, if not healingly, appropriate.
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