The Ghost Orchid - Hardcover

Michael Longley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 091639073X ISBN 13: 9780916390730

Publisher: Wake Forest University Press, 2012

Synopsis

A collection of poetry from the Irish poet whose last book "Gorse Fires" won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Whether writing about Sissinghurst, Japan, Buchenwald or Belfast, Longley speaks with delicacy and passion about love and loss, life and death. This is a limited edition of 100.

About this title

Review:

"Irish poets learn your trade/Sing whatever is well made," Yeats thundered, a mandate to which Michael Longley has long proved equal. Love poet, mythologist, translator, and visionary, he dreams above all of an ideal peace but writes achingly of "history left ajar," of World War II's legacy and Northern Ireland's too-casual violence. In "The Ice-Cream Man" (from 1991's Gorse Fires), Longley draws one victim into his family's fold: "Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:/You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before/They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road/And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop...."

Longley's most recent volume, The Ghost Orchid, contains fewer direct accounts of the Troubles and a host of transformations. There are adaptations of "Ovid's lovely casualties," notably "Arachne" and "Perdix"--in which Pallas Athene turns the young Daedalus's nephew into a "garrulous partridge." She "dressed him in feathers in mid-air and made him a bird,/Intelligence flashing to wing-tip and claw." There are also seven Irished translations from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Home from battle in full armor, Hector is amused when the "nightmarish nodding" of his helmet terrifies his baby son. Two poems later, in "Ceasefire," an aged Priam makes peace with Achilles: "I get down on my knees and do what must be done/And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son." The son, of course, is Hector.

Longley has been called "a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders," and he does his best to balance tragedy with ecstasy in hushed love poems such as "Snow-Hole" and "Couplet": "When I was young I wrote that flowers are very slow flames/And you uncovered your breasts often among my images." Elsewhere, Longley commingles love and nature with less intensity but with no less awe or brilliance.

About the Author:

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939. He has recently retired from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland where he was Combined Arts Director. His previous collections include Poems 1963-83 and Gorse Fires, which won the 1991 Whitbread Poetry Award. He is married to the critic Edna Longley and they have three children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 091639073X
• ISBN 13: 9780916390730
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 62