Michael Longley, one of Ireland’s leading poets, died on Wednesday night in Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital following a short illness.
His 13 collections have received many awards, including the Whitbread Prize, the TS Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. Ash Keys: New Selected Poems was published last July to mark his 85th birthday, bringing together more than 50 years of poetry, from his first collection, No Continuing City (1969), to The Slain Birds (2022).
Leading tributes to the poet, President Michael D Higgins described Longley as “one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced”.
“It is with the deepest sadness that I, like so many others, have learned of the death of Michael Longley. I regarded him as a peerless poet with at least three poetic lives. It is, however, the generosity of his heart, and the lovely cadence of a voice of love and friendship that I will most remember,” the president said.
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“Michael Longley will be recognised as one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced, and it has long been my belief that his work is of the level that would be befitting of a Nobel Prize for Literature. The range of his work was immense, be it from the heartbreak of loss to the assurance of the resilience of beauty in nature.”
In an interview with The Irish Times last year, Longley said: “I wanted to touch on the things that have activated me, like the west of Ireland, like nature, like animals, like love, like sex, like politics, like the Holocaust, the first World War. I wanted to represent all of those, to be true to my preoccupations.”
Although he was born and lived almost all his life in Belfast, he was profoundly influenced by his time as a student at Trinity College Dublin, where he fell in love with poetry and his fellow student and future wife, the critic Edna Longley, and at his second home in Carrigskeewaun, Co Mayo, the “soul landscape” that has long inspired his poetry.
In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed Commander of the British Empire 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 received the freedom of Belfast.
Although he identified as Irish, he also explored and respected the British identity of his parents, who moved to Belfast from England in 1927.
“I’ve no doubt that I’m an Irish poet, or I’m nothing,” Longley said last year. “I’ve been cheering for Irish teams since I was a teenager, 60 or 70 years, especially when they’re playing England.
“My dad, who I think about every day … was at the Battle of the Somme, and he won the Military Cross for gallantry. They both loved Ireland. He was what you would call a working-class Tory. Going to Inst (Royal Belfast Academical Institution) and then to Trinity and starting to read the New Statesman and The Irish Times and the Guardian, which is what I still read, my father didn’t quite understand.
“I feel Irish … Ireland has given me all the data out of which I make sense of life, and I think my soul would shrivel if I denied the Britannic side. In a way, Trinity helped us, and discovering the west of Ireland helped us.”
In 2022 Longley was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize for poetry, a major international prize. The citation read: “Longley is an extraordinary poet of landscape, particularly of the Irish west, which he observes with the delicate and passionate attention of an ecologist, and a tragic singer of Ireland and its dramatic history. But he has also addressed the seduction, conquest, and fascination of love, as well as the shock of war in all ages, the tragedy of the Holocaust and of the gulags, and the themes of loss, grief and pity.”
An early poem, The Flying Fish, was published in The Irish Times in 1962. It began a decades-long relationship with this newspaper as a poetry reviewer and as an outlet for his poetry. In 1966 Longley reviewed a first volume of poems by “an impressive young Ulster poet”, Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney.
With Heaney and fellow Trinity graduate Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and others, he became part of what became known as the Belfast Group encouraged by university lecturer, Prof Philip Hobsbaum.
Longley’s life and poetry were profoundly marked by the Troubles. His most famous poem, Ceasefire, was published in The Irish Times in 1994, shortly after the first IRA ceasefire, its closing couplet capturing the forgiveness and compromise that the subsequent Belfast Agreement would require to secure a lasting peace. “I get down on my knees and do what must be done/ And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”
He is survived by his wife Edna, their three children, Rebecca, Daniel and Sarah, and seven grandchildren. The family death notice said: “Michael will be remembered widely for his warmth, humour, friendship, intellect and his many contributions to the arts on the island of Ireland, the UK and across the world. In particular, his wonderful poems will remain with us always, providing comfort and connection to him; his words will live on, enriching our lives every day.”
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