Selected Poems - Softcover

Michael Longley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224050354 ISBN 13: 9780224050357

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1998

Synopsis

This is Michael Longley’s own selection from thirty years of writing. It reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work, which has been celebrated in Britain and Ireland, but also in the United States for its lyric intensity, metaphysical wit, and thematic and formal range. Includes selections from No Continuing City (1969), An Exploded View (1973), Man Lying on a Wall (1976), The Echo Gate (1979), New Poems, Gorse Fires (1991), and The Ghost Orchid (1995).

About this title

About the Author

Michael Longley was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1939. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and studied Classics at Trinity College. Strongly influenced by the classics, he has alluded to his love of Homer in many of his poems. Early in his career, Longley worked as a schoolteacher in Dublin, London, and Belfast. He founded the literary program in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and in 1970 he became the assistant director of that organization. In 2010, he was honored with the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of Aosdána, an affiliation for Irish artists. He is married to the critic Edna Longley and has three children. Michael Longley has written nine collections of poetry. Holding honorary doctorates from both Trinity College, Dublin, and Queen’s University, Belfast, Longley was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001. He has received numerous other awards for his work, including the American Irish Foundation Award, the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Ulster Tatler Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He served as the Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 2010.

Review

With each volume Michael Longley publishes, a growing readership delights in the triumphs of his poems. --Harvard Review, Fall 1999

Longley has... a curious private passion for crafting beautiful language games. --Adrian Frazier, Irish Times, 1998

Written between 1963 and 1994, the poems gathered in Selected Poems... reveal both a remarkable consistency of scrupulous stylistic execution and an impressive steadiness of thematic evolution. --Thomas O'Grady, Irish Literary Supplement

Longley's body of work is much more varied and impressive than this review could suggest. Like the best poetry, his defies analysis in prose. --Richard Rankin Russell, The Carolina Quarterly

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0224050354
• ISBN 13: 9780224050357
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144