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.

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

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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