Michael Longley (1939–2025)
We are deeply saddened by today's news of the death of Michael Longley, aged 85. He died in hospital in Belfast on Wednesday from complications following a hip operation.
Ireland's President Michael D. Higgins paid tribute to 'one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced'. 'The range of his work was immense, he said, 'be it from the heartbreak of loss to the assurance of the resilience of beauty in nature' […] 'It is, however, the generosity of his heart, and the lovely cadence of a voice of love and friendship that I will most remember.' Michael Longley's long friendships with other poets and the unstinting support he gave fellow writers, both in public and private, were such that he will be widely mourned not only as a distinguished poet but as an extraordinarily warm, gentle, generous, humane and wholly authentic man of letters.
Born in 1939, Michael Longley was an Irish poet of English parentage who spent most of his life in Belfast, and stayed there throughout the Northern Irish 'Troubles'. He studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin, where he first met his future wife, the critic Edna Longley, and was part of a group of student poets – whose poems he published in the magazine Icarus – and were to become lifelong friends, including Derek Mahon, Brendan Kennelly and Eavan Boland.
Back in Belfast and newly married, he joined another group of poet friends who met often to read and discuss each other's work, both in Belfast pubs and at the flat of poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum, who nurtured workshop-style gatherings of poets and other writers which came to be known as The Group, first in Cambridge and then in London, Sheffield, Belfast and Glasgow, with Michael Longley being part of the so-called Belfast Group along with Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Stewart Parker and Bernard MacLaverty. Following Hobsbawm's departure, the Belfast Group morphed into a wider, rowdier forum which included poets such as Frank Ormsby, James Simmons, Michael Foley, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson, with Edna Longley often in attendance. He worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1991, facilitating much needed support for fellow writers as well as for poetry publishers as Literature Director.
A dedicated naturalist, he and Edna spent part of every year at their second home at Carrigskeewan on the coast of Co. Mayo, the inspiration for much of his poetry, often in the company of their children Rebecca, Daniel and Sarah, and seven grandchildren. Sarah's art depicting the natural world was nurtured there, and she and her father engaged in a number of poet and artist collaborations.
He published his first full-length collection, No Continuing City, in 1969 with Macmillan, which was followed by An Exploded View (1973) and Man Lying on a Wall (1976) from Gollancz, before moving to Secker & Warburg with The Echo Gate (1979), the last of his collections before a long fallow period in his poetry. He returned to writing and publishing over a decade later with Gorse Fires from Secker in 1991 and Gorse Fires (1995), the first of many books from Jonathan Cape with Robin Robertson, who'd moved from Secker, as his editor. His subsequent titles with Cape were The Weather in Japan (2000), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Snow Water (2004), Collected Poems (2006), A Hundred Doors (2011), The Stairwell (2014), Angel Hill (2017), The Candlelight Master (2020) and The Slain Birds (2022).
Throughout his writing career he published other books, including collaborations, translations and limited editions, with a variety of publishers such as the Gallery Press, the Salamander Press, Abbey Press, Enitharmon Press and Fine Press Poetry, also publishing US editions of his books with Wake Forest University Press, along with a memoir, Tuppeny Stung: Autobiographical Chapters (1994), with Belfast's Lagan Press.
His long association with Bloodaxe Books goes back to the early 1980s, when he suggested to Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley that he should publish the first of Edna's collection of essays on poetry, Poetry in the Wars (1986). Just as Edna was Michael's first critic for his poetry, so Michael became Edna's sounding-board for the books she worked on with Astley at Bloodaxe, and was a supportive presence in their editorial discussions in Belfast and Carrigskeewan as well as behind later email exchanges. Edna acted as an editorial adviser to Bloodaxe for many years and Michael read the books she received, often passing on personal notes of appreciation to be passed on to surprised and delighted younger poets.
He co-edited The Essential Brendan Kennelly (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) with Terence Brown, and wrote the introduction to Frank Ormsby's Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015). He was delighted by Bloodaxe's publication of Fran Brearton's critical guide, Reading Michael Longley, in 2006.
He also contributed playful versions of the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu in Bloodaxe's The Biggest Egg in the World (1987), a Belfast-based collaboration edited by Edna in the company of poets including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Ted Hughes. This was followed in 1992 by When the Tunnels Meet: Contemporary Romanian Poetry, edited by Belfast's unofficial cultural ambassador to Romanian, John Fairleigh, in which ten Irish poets translated the work of ten Romanian poets, with Michael paired with Ileana Mălăncioiu, who in turn translated his poetry into Romanian for a "mirror" anthology in which the same Irish poets were translated by the same Romanian poets, Flăcări himerice: poezie irlandeză contemporană (Editura Univers, Bucharest, 1996), also edited by John Fairleigh.
Michael Longley won most of the prizes awardable to poetry, including the the Griffin Poetry Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the Wilfred Owen Award, the Librex Montale Prize and the Feltrinelli international Poetry Prize, as well as the PEN Pinter Prize, awarded annually to a writer who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an 'unflinching, unswerving' gaze upon the world. He received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2001, and was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday honours in 2010.
Ni bheidh a leithead ann aris.
Michael George Longley, born Belfast, 27 July 1939; died Belfast, 22 January 2025
[23 January 2025]
Tributes so far published include (click on links to read):
The Guardian (obituary by Patricia Craig)
[23 January 2025]
