Ash Keys

byMichael Longley

New Selected Poems

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Michael Longley's last book: a collection of his greatest poems, spanning an extraordinary career of sixty years

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

Times

About Michael Longley

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 and his wife the critic Edna Longley live and work. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.
Details
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • ISBN: 9781787334854
  • Length: 208 pages
  • Price: £13.00
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