Michael Longley: Northern Ireland's poet of nature

Contemporary Review, April, 2002 by Liam Heaney

MICHAEL Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He read classics at Trinity College Dublin and for some years taught in Dublin, London and Belfast. In 1970 he became Director of Combined Arts at the Northern Ireland Arts Council, taking early retirement in 1991. His first collection of poetry, No Continuing City (1969) in which he largely explored urban themes, demonstrated Longley's innate talent and technical expertise. This is a book of witty, evocative, allusive poetry. An Exploded View followed in 1973 dealing with issues associated with the Troubles in Northern Ireland and more broadly with the victims of war. Man Lying on a Wall (1976) reveals Longley's engagement with the world of nature, specifically the wildlife and landscape of County Mayo. In this collection, the natural world is used as a backdrop for images of death, violence and love. In The Echo Gate (1979) he continues to explore these important issues. A lengthy break ensued before Go rse Fires emerged in 1991. A short volume of autobiography, Tuppenny Stung, was published in 1994, followed by The Ghost Orchid in 1995 and The Weather in Japan in 2000.

Longley has received many prestigious awards for his work. He was awarded the Whitbread Prize for Poetry for his book Gorse Fires and in July 2000, he received the Hawthornden award for The Weather in Japan. This is Britain's longest established literary prize. Other writers who have received it include Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul and Sean O'Casey. Since then Longley has won other notable literary awards, such as, the T. S. Eliot prize for poetry and more recently the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He has an exceptional talent and is an extraordinary poet. An exploration of his work will serve to illustrate his considerable creative genius.

Longley's poetry essentially stems from the natural and physical world, particularly from the woodlands and landscape of Ireland. This is seen in poems such as, 'The White Butterfly', 'The Osprey' and 'The Ornithological Section'. Longley, like Seamus Heaney, is very much concerned with his own personal development as an artist and in many instances he employs graphic images from nature to define and clarify his thinking.

In 'Icon and Lares', Gerald Dawe (1985) suggests that for Michael Longley, 'the west of Ireland is seen as an embodiment of some kind of alternative life, a fictional life that compensates for certain values and attitudes missing in the real, given, historical world'. However, even through the west may be a place of escape for Longley, it nonetheless represents a haven in which he can explore more fully his perceptions of reality. Moreover, it appears that Longley is enraptured, even spellbound, by the intricacy and delicacy of nature's complexity and magnificence.

In his poem, 'In Mayo', Longley demonstrates his fascination and involvement with nature. To perceive its beauty and depth to the full, he allows his imagination to reawaken, to come alive, 'For her sake once again I disinter/ Imagination'. This suggests, that not only does nature influence his thinking, but that nature itself is somehow linked to his personal past. His unearthing of his imagination, reminds one of an archaeological dig, in which remarkable artefacts are frequently uncovered, revealing something of a past that is lost, but not forgotten. Furthermore, the process of disinterring, has connotations of bringing to the surface once again, that which has been latent or dead. By grappling with the complexities of nature and the phenomena of the physical world, by confronting reality, the poet confirms his need to come to terms with his poetic creativity.

His assertion that, 'We follow the footprints of animals', may be an engaging pastime for the naturalist, but there is also the implication that these footprints are signs of the past. They trace a pathway from the past into the future. They visually represent the type of animal life that once came that way, yet the footprints remain to be followed and explored. A parallel might be drawn with the poet and the naturalist. As the naturalist instinctively follows the discovered prints, to determine their origin and to identify the creature that made them, so must the artist follow his poetic sensibilities and intuition to record reality as he perceives it. Seamus Heaney extends this idea, in The Redress of Poetry (1995), in which he proposes that, 'Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world'.

Longley returns to this theme of representing the world as he sees it, in 'Spring Tide', where he refers to the footprints of the cattle, the sheep and his own, remaining under 'A map of water'. These footprints he leaves as 'hieroglyphics under glass'. Significantly, the animals' footprints, which represent the world of nature, and Longley's own footprints, remain together. Longley could be said to be 'at one' with nature.