The Slain Birds

Using ornithology as a guide, Longley's exhilarating songbook offers a risk assessment of our world under threat... The Slain Birds is a book of quietude and disquiet in Longley's prolific repertoire.

One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars.

Michael Longley's poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience.

A contemporary who should endure over the life of our language.

[Longley] at 83 is so secure as a great he can write poems of simple, pellucid beauty, touching universal experience.

Michael Longley’s thirteen collections have received many awards, among them the Whitbread Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. 
 
In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he lived and worked with his wife, the critic Edna Longley, until his death in 2025. For his lifetime achievement in poetry he was awarded the 2022 Feltrinelli Poetry Prize, and in 2024 the International Roma Prize.

**WINNER OF THE 2022 FELTRINELLI INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE ** 
 
 
'One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars.' Sebastian Barry 
 
Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'. The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'. 'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery. This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.

The Candlelight Master

The new book from the greatest living Irish poet.

Michael Longley's luminous The Candlelight Master...demonstrate[s] how much poetry matters even in the most terrible of times.

*AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR* 
 
'I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certainty.' So wrote Maria Johnston, reviewing Longley's previous book Angel Hill. Yet The Candlelight Master does not only face into shadows. The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter. Other poems about painters - Matisse, Bonnard - imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says: 'We gaze on our soul-landscapes / More intensely with every year.' The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures. His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots 'Hochmagandy'. Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley's Carrigskeewaun.

Angel Hill

A Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the Year 
 
‘A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders’ Seamus Heaney 
 
Winner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prize 
Shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize

Michael Longley’s Angel Hill…is at once elegiac and celebratory, and achingly beautiful. Longley has honed his poetry to the bone, but how the bone does shine.

There are few contemporary poets as likeable as Michael Longley. That’s not because his poems are simply amiable, but because he looks at things hard and clearly and invites his readers to share his acts of seeing… Longley is one of few contemporary poets who can capture Homer’s spare and unrelenting humanity… The Stairwell (2014) – one of the loveliest collections of verse in the past decade… Literary historians of the future will no doubt position Longley among his fellow Irish poets Heaney and Mahon as the heirs of Yeats, and if not children of the Troubles then their wise observers.

The pleasure of reviewing becomes a privilege when presented with poets and poetry of this quality... To adopt and adapt a phrase from The Beatles...Longley in [his]communion of the spirit and the soul gift[s] us with alchemical compounds, “saviours of the human race”.

Thoughtful, elegant poems that celebrate family life, grandchildren, and a long marriage.

Unafraid to capture the intimacies and specifics of this life, Longley is also one of the very few poets able to take us, time and again, to a place as “Wild and melodious” as the birdsong he celebrates.

Lush and elegiac, delicate and muscular, melancholy and thrilling.

Quietly intense and lyrically beautiful… True greatness shows in poems in memory of his friend Seamus Heaney, in exquisite evocations of landscapes in Ireland and Scotland, and in celebrations of married love.

Angel Hill encapsulates, in rich and powerful verse, everything that it is to be Michael Longley… His poetry has peace to it, a sense of contentment... It has all the craft and meaning of someone who’s been writing poetry for fifty years. It is, at its best, timeless.

Already the virtues of a Longley poem are on display: the easy conversational manner, the unselfconscious shaping of line and stanza, the ability to sound a genuinely affectionate, unsentimental note.

A Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the Year 
 
Winner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prize 
Shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize 
 
 
A remote townland in County Mayo, Carrigskeewaun has been for nearly fifty years Michael Longley’s home-from-home, his soul-landscape. Its lakes and mountains, wild animals and flowers, its moody seas and skies have for decades lit up his poetry. Now they overflow into Angel Hill, his exuberant new collection. In addition, Longley has been exploring Lochalsh in the Western Highlands where his daughter the painter Sarah Longley now lives with her family. She has opened up for him her own soul-landscape with its peculiar shapes and intense colours. In Angel Hill the imaginations of poet and painter intermingle and two exacting wildernesses productively overlap. Love poems and elegies and heart-rending reflections on the Great War and the Northern Irish Troubles add further weight to Michael Longley’s outstanding eleventh collection. Angel Hill will undoubtedly delight this great poet’s many admirers.

The Stairwell

In his 75th year, the tenth collection by the greatest living Northern Irish poet 
 
Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

It is…the warmth in Longley’s writing that marks his poems out, makes them cherishable. Never forced, that affection is simply there.

Longley’s 10th collection weaves his classical themes of war, family and flaura and fauna into measured songs of commemoration for those he has loved.

A book of tiny, delicately lyrical commemorations and commendations.

The Stairwell…is a stupendous collection of quiet beauty and universal significance.

The book I have loved best, and have gone back to again and again.

The Stairwell is a book reckless in loving, to make the skin prickle and the eyes blur.

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize 
 
 
In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence – both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin’s death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word ‘stairwell’ is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and ‘homeland’. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

A Hundred Doors

One of the finest lyric poets of our century

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless...he is a master in an old, great tradition

In his truest and most enduring poems, Longley manages, in Yeats's words, to hold justice and reality in a single thought without doing violence to either. The many poems in which Longley succeeds in this aim are among the great poems of our time

Longley's war poetry can stand comparison with the best of this century

Longley's poems count the phenomena of the natural world with the particular deliberate pleasure of a lover's fingers wandering along the bumpy path of the vertebrae

As Longley moves into hte old age that was so enabling for many of the finest poets and artists - W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman come to mind first off - his words are moving more gracefully than ever

Of the modern writers who deal with conflict, I believe Michael Longley, whose father fought in the First World War, is the greatest figure we have. I carry his work with me to the war zones of the world

Michael Longley has remarkable powers of reinvention. Certain themes remain constant - the natural world, war, violence, love, friendship, art, death - but they also keep changing because the forms and genres of his poetry never stand still. In A Hundred Doors a sinuous short line complements his variations on pentameter and hexameter. And Longley's interlacing of individual lyrics, so that a diverse collection seems a single poem, intensifies in the shadow of mortality. 
 
A sequence about his grandchildren's births is counterpointed by elegies, including Longley's continuing elegy for the Great War dead. The Mayo townland, Carrigskeewaun, with its cast of leverets, otters, swans, wrens, lesser twayblade and bird's-foot trefoil, also takes on fresh guises. Longley is among Europe's foremost 'ecological' poets. Yet Carrigskeewaun is ultimately symbolic, a microcosm, a 'soul-arena'. 
 
A Hundred Doors roams in time and space. The title-poem evokes the oldest Byzantine church in Greece: Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. The remains of a Greek temple 'ache' beneath its floor. Wild orchids, which crop up in Greece and the Italian Garfagnana as well as Ireland, are among the collection's multiple 'doors'. Others are music and paintings, 'cloudberry jam from Lapland', a Shetland pony. This is work of power, precision and delicacy: poems that 'bend and magnify the daylight', poems by a master craftsman.

Gorse Fires

'Few living poets can write as perceptively and as movingly... The tragic vision expressed throughout the collection makes Gorse Fires burn with grim intensity. This is major work' - John Banville, Independent on Sunday. 
 
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry.

Longley’s skilfulness and experience are evident in poems where, in the choice of a single word, the focus of the description shifts… For all its looking back, however, the book feels curiously timeless… In his poems of the natural world, Longley is still a master of miniatures: there is an astonished, almost shortsighted intensity to the way he looks at what lies around him, in his familiar Carrigskeewaun habitat as well as in the Scottish locales this collection also visits.

A contemporary who should endure over the life of our language

Longley may not possess, or want, the international glamour of some of his contemporaries, but the poems in Gorse Fires, both individually and collectively, bewitch with the magic of coherence

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

Michael Longley's poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience

His measured rhythms, skilfully crafted metaphors and elaborate syntax always insist on poetry's origins in ceremony, its powers to commemorate or dignify

Emerging, as it did, after over a decade of silence, Gorse Fires had an immediate and resounding impact - revealing a poetry that seemed renewed and re-energised - and winning the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1991. It is now regarded as the pivotal book in Michael Longley's distinguished career. 
 
If Ireland remains Longley's starting-point or implied focus, it is often sighted through disturbing perspectives that derive from foreign cultures, from Homer's Odyssey, from the Second World War, and from the Holocaust. Even his beautifully precise poems about the West of Ireland are shadowed by the many destructive forces ranged against the creative act. 
 
Longley's versions of Odysseus' return to Ithaca and 'Ghetto' (based on the Polish ghettoes) epitomise his concern with the meaning of home and family. He sees these archetypes of Western civilisation as vulnerable, problematic, violated by power. Odysseus' homecoming involves murder and vengeance as well as reunions - a connection with the ambiguities of life in Northern Ireland. 
 
Gorse Fires is an unusual artistic blend: darkly austere, yet abundant in images, catalogues and syntactical virtuosity. The formal links between poems gives the whole collection the air of a richly varied sequence; it is a work of the highest order.

Emerging, as it did, after over a decade of silence, Gorse Fires had an immediate and resounding impact - revealing a poetry that seemed renewed and re-energised - and winning the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1991. It is now regarded as the pivotal book in Michael Longley's distinguished career. 
 
If Ireland remains Longley's starting-point or implied focus, it is often sighted through disturbing perspectives that derive from foreign cultures, from Homer's Odyssey, from the Second World War, and from the Holocaust. Even his beautifully precise poems about the West of Ireland are shadowed by the many destructive forces ranged against the creative act. 
 
Longley's versions of Odysseus' return to Ithaca and 'Ghetto' (based on the Polish ghettoes) epitomise his concern with the meaning of home and family. He sees these archetypes of Western civilisation as vulnerable, problematic, violated by power. Odysseus' homecoming involves murder and vengeance as well as reunions - a connection with the ambiguities of life in Northern Ireland. 
 
Gorse Fires is an unusual artistic blend: darkly austere, yet abundant in images, catalogues and syntactical virtuosity. The formal links between poems gives the whole collection the air of a richly varied sequence; it is a work of the highest order. 
 
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry.

Collected Poems

'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' - Seamus Heaney

Collected Poems is vital...and reminds us that Longley is not only a lyric poet of the first rank, but a clear-sighted observer who knows the real world when he sees it, even as he knows that it cannot be grasped, only celebrated, or interrogated, or mourned - which is to say, given its due - as it passes

A wonderfully capacious book, at once stringent and delicate

Of the modern writers who deal with conflict, I believe Michael Longley, whose father fought in the First World War, is the greatest figure we have. I carry his work with me to the war zones of the world

An essential book for anyone interested in poetry

Michael Longley's Collected Poems brings together in one beautifully designed volume the work of this marvellous poet, reminding us, if we needed reminding, of the authority of his voice and the beauty of his line

[A] gravely beautiful book - the record of four decades of a practice  which has helped keep lyric poetry in English both necessary and alive

In his truest and most enduring poems, Longley manages, in Yeats' words, to hold justice and reality in a single thought without doing violence to either. The many poems in which Longley succeeds in this aim are among the great poems of our time

Michael Longley's Collected Poems delineate a 40-year achievement whose scale can now be appreciated

Michael Longley has been called 'one of the finest lyric poets of our time'. In assembling the work of forty years, his Collected Poems displays a brilliantly sustained achievement whose depth, beauty and wit can now be fully appreciated. Longley's poetry combines intense concentration with remarkable variety. The formal and thematic range laid down in No Continuing City (1969) has undergone a series of rich metamorphoses up to Snow Water (2004), and the two poems included here as an epilogue. 
 
Longley's genres span love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires, verse epistles, poems that reflect on art and the art of poetry. He has extended the capacity of the lyric to absorb dark matter: the Great War, the Holocaust, the Northern Irish 'Troubles'. His poetic landscape intermingles Belfast (where he lives), western Ireland, Italy, Japan and Homeric Greece. Longley's superb translations from classical poets (such as 'Ceasefire', which greets the IRA ceasefire in terms of the Iliad) speak to contemporary issues while activating the deepest sources of European poetry.

Snow Water

An exquisite collection from 'one of the finest lyric poets of our century' (John Burnside). 
 
By the winner of the T.S.Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Irish Times Poetry. Prize

His work indicates one of the gifts of the major poet, of making the one life speak for all, and its corollary, of seeming to be able to speak to anyone

Michael Longley's affectionate metre, his clean-cut and lucid measure, is one of the most distinguished accomplishments in contemporary poetry

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of grief and wonders

The poems collected in Snow Water find their gravity and centre in Michael Longley's adopted home in west Mayo, but range widely in their attention - from ancient Greece to Paris and Pisa, from Central Park to the trenches of the Somme. Meditations on nature and mortality, there is a depth and delicacy to these poems, a state of lucid wonder, that allows for the easy companionship of love poem and elegy, hymns to marriage and friendship and lyric explorations of loss. 
 
Though the embodiment of these themes is often found in the wildlife of Carrigskeewaun and Allaran Point - the plovers and oystercatchers, whooper swans and snow geese, the hares and otters, the marsh marigolds and yellow flags - Snow Water is emphatically a celebration of humanity. These are all, in a way, poems of love and kinship - even the magnificent sequence that links the horrors of the Great War with those of the Trojan War, and with all the wars between. 
 
What Longley says of Edward Thomas might easily be said of him: 'The nature poet turned into a war poet as if/ He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf'. Full of intensity and grace, tenderness and wisdom, these are poems of deceptive simplicity from a craftsman of international stature.

The Weather In Japan

Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, the T.S. Eliot prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize; The Weather in Japan is a superb collection from one of our greatest living poets.

A keeper of the aristic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

While much contemporary verse attempts to sound casual, even offhand, Longley has consistently explored ways of thickening the texture of his idiom. His measured rhythms, skillfully crafted metaphors and elaborate syntax always insist on poetry's origins in ceremony, its powers to commemorate and dignify... His poetry binds the actual and mythical so seamlessly one looks in vain for the joints

Longley has all the necessary gifts - precision, the celebrant's tongue, and that touch ofmystery that sets certain poets apart

In the space of two collections, Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995), Michael Longley broke a long poetic slience and re-drew the map of poetry at the end of the millenium. The Weather in Japan consolidates and expands the vision of those volumes, leading the reader through the various hells we have made this century. 
 
Preferring to see the horrors of political violence through the filter of the domestic, pointing up the fragility of the order we create, he takes us from the fields of Flanders, through Terezin and Auschwitz to the troubled north of Ireland. And, in images drawn from the west of Ireland, Italy, America and Japan, he explores the fundamentals of 'home' and 'civilisation'. 
 
Longley's grave humanity, Zen-like connective imagination and ecological eye give the most delicate compelx, beautiful things - a spring gentian, a lapwing or a snowflake - the nutritious light that allows them to grow greater than the crass brutality that surrounds them.

Selected Poems

Michael Longley is, after Seamus Heaney, the most important poet to come out of the North of Ireland.

Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic and formal range, Michael Longley is widely regarded as one of the finest poets in these islands. His life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe in which love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violance. There are no hard boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies. Longley looks to the poets of Greece and Rome, particularly Homer and Ovid, and to the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, has been to distil the large and difficult themes into highly concentrated forms. 
 
This is Michael Longley's own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work.

Michael Longley

Paul Muldoon

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless... A master in an old, great tradition

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

Seamus Heaney, author of Death of a Naturalist

His poems rest on the page like driftwood, seasoned and made beautiful by an ocean of experience

One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars

Sebastian Barry, author of Old God's Time

Michael Longley’s poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience

Michael Longley is a great poet whose work will endure while the English language does

Longley has all the necessary gifts – precision, the celebrant’s tongue, and that touch of mystery that sets certain poets apart

This new selection of his [Longley’s] poetry, drawing on his 13 published collections, shows his range and power. He is one of the great poets of landscape, as well as a powerful, pained commentator on Northern Ireland’s troubled history

With Ash Keys we gain access to the past and relive its colour… Now, more than ever, Longley’s work deserves to be widely read and treasured

Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first

Ash Keys…reminds us of the consistent yet varied empathies express throughout this great poet’s finely wrought lyrics

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Ash Keys confirms his [Longley’s] standing as one of the most compelling and luminous poets writing today

Michael Longley thinks like no one else, and the resulting poems replenish your senses and bring you home to yourself

As I've grown older and calmed down, I find myself spending deeper time with the brilliance of work I might earlier have hurtled past… more recently Michael Longley too, in his beautiful Ash Keys

Strongly recommended. Selected volumes are intended to provoke new readings of familiar poems, and this one works superbly – I had undervalued his later verse, thinking it slight in comparison to earlier work. This proves me wrong

New Selected Poems

A collection of Michael Longley's greatest poems, spanning an extraordinary career of sixty years as one of the Belfast triumverate, alongside Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon 
 
'One of the world's greats' IRISH NEWS 
 
'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' SEAMUS HEANEY 
 
The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem ‘Ash Keys’. The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be an image for poems in search of their readers. This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley’s unusual range as a lyric poet. 
 
It shows how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages – as do depth, wit and beauty. 
 
'His work is of the level that would be befitting of a Novel Prize for Literature' MICHAEL D HIGGINS 
 
'Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first' Times Literary Supplement

Michael Longley

Praise for Ash Keys

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless... A master in an old, great tradition

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

His poems rest on the page like driftwood, seasoned and made beautiful by an ocean of experience

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless... A master in an old, great tradition

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

His poems rest on the page like driftwood, seasoned and made beautiful by an ocean of experience

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless... A master in an old, great tradition

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

His poems rest on the page like driftwood, seasoned and made beautiful by an ocean of experience

Books by Michael Longley

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