Gorse Fires - Softcover

Longley, Michael

4.25

28 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0436256746 ISBN 13: 9780436256745

Publisher: Secker & Warburg, 1991

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A collection of poetry which uses Ireland for a starting point or implied focus. It is an Ireland often sighted through disturbing perspectives derived from foreign cultures such as Homer's "Odyssey", World War II and the Holocaust. This is the winner of the 1991 Whitbread Prize for Poetry.

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About the Author:

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College Dublin where he read Classics. He has published ten collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006. In 2001 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was awarded a CBE in 2010. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2007-2010. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.

Review:

"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." -- John McAuliffe * The Irish Times * "A contemporary who should endure over the life of our language" -- Donald Hall "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" -- Carol Ann Duffy * Guardian * "A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders" -- Seamus Heaney "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" -- James Fenton

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