Michael Longley : A Poet in his Prime

Eamonn Hughes

Fortnight Issue 393 March 2001

[Snow Water] [Above Dooaghtry] [Leaves] [The Lizard]
[The Pattern] [The Pheasants] [The Strangford Stone]

T he award of the T.S. Eliot Prize to Michael Longley for The Weather in Japan (2000), already the recipient of the Hawthornden Prize, provides an occasion to celebrate a poet whose reputation is at last beginning to equal his achievements. Having said in interview, with typical mischievousness, that he disapproves of prizes until he wins one, Longley may be just as pleased with some other recent honours: his poetry is on the Leaving Certificate syllabus; he was selected for the RTE series Reading the Future as one of the dozen writers most likely to be read a century hence; and the first book devoted to him, The Poetry of Michael Longley (2000, eds. Alan J. Peacock and Kathleen Devine), has just been published. Even with all of this attention he has not yet received his due.
The Weather in Japan has been seen as the culmination of a remarkable artistic renewal in the 1990s, starting with Gorse Fires (1991) which was followed by The Ghost Orchid (1995) and, in 1998, a Selected Poems. (At this point I must declare an interest: as one of the dedicatees of that volume I view this article as a way of saying thank you, though, as will become clear, the premium put on honesty and exactitude in Longleys poetry means that this will work as an act of gratitude only if it is honest and exact.) Most famously, perhaps, in the 1990s Longley also wrote 'Ceasefire'. Published in the Irish Times just two days after the first IRA ceasefire, it achieved an instant iconic status which can tell us something about Longley and his reputation. Written by Longley (and its brilliant and pointed summarising of a long Homeric passage into sonnet form means that it could not have been written by anyone else) it is also somehow separate from him. The poems powerful closing image of forgiveness and reconciliation is probably known by many for whom poetry is a closed book. Critics of contemporary poetry refer to it without following its trail back into Longleys poetry and its long-standing engagements with war, the poetry of war and the Greek classics which are being voiced in 'Ceasefire'. What is also being voiced is something which few other writers of Longleys generation (and even fewer academics) share: the concern of a citizen. Longley has remained in Belfast, has, to borrow from his friend Derek Mahon, lived it bomb by bomb. His under-valuation, until recently, might be related to the fact that he does not fit the standard patterns—based on ideas such as exile and dispossession—within which contemporary poetry is discussed.
Another factor in that under-valuation is the silence that preceded Gorse Fires which, simply put, removed him from view, and which is wrongly seen as a division between the earlier and the later work. This silence was not however entirely negative. In interviews Longley has referred to it as a period in which new forms and rhythms accumulated. His poetry of the 1990s in turn has made much of a tactful brevity in poems, such as 'Terezin', which approach the condition of silence:
No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.
(Gorse Fires) The near silence of this poem, a whisper afraid to break the reverence due to such an awful silence, is nevertheless an expression of the need to say something. Like 'Ceasefire', the poem is committed to certain civic and public principles which preoccupied Longley throughout the 1980s, when silent as a poet, he was, however, in full voice as someone battling against what Hannah Arendt called the rule of nobody. In Blackthorn and Bonsai, a lecture reprinted in his autobiographical collection Tupenny Stung (1994), he tells of his time as an Arts Administrator for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; for him the first part of his job title had always to outweigh the second part despite those who saw administration as an end in itself.
The obvious charge to lay against Longley would be that while he remained in Belfast, it was in leafy suburban South Belfast secure in a personal and professional enclave insulated from much of the worst of the Troubles. In these circumstances it might not seem much to advance the negative proposition that he did not leave; that is not an option open to all. However, staying was not a passive option. Longley had already left Belfast for Trinity where, as well as studying Classics, he served his poetic apprenticeship alongside Derek Mahon (and not, despite the common misperception, in The Group in Belfast). On his return he brought with him ideas formed elsewhere, which then fed into an active and oppositional role. The cultural and social confidence now evident in the North is very different from that provincialism, that cultural cringe, which afflicted Northern Irish society for so long. The overcoming of provincialism is as good a summary of Longleys career with the Arts Council as any. For the generations before and into the 1970s the action was always elsewhere, in Dublin, London or the US. Longleys commitment to the local (without ever losing sight of elsewhere: Odysseus has long been a central persona in his poetry) whether in Literature or Traditional Arts was a commitment to the values of the local. Nor was this abstract only: the local was brought to the local in poetry tours such as The Planter and the Gael and In Their Element as well as in tours of traditional Irish musicians often to places where they would never otherwise have played. Longley also fostered local writing and publishing, and criticism—the local has always to prove its value, not simply be granted it. Through the Arts Council and in the teeth of provincially-minded opposition within it, he was undertaking the work of the Cultural Traditions Group avant la lettre, of which he was a founding member in 1988. Even those with reservations about the work of that group must acknowledge the attempts to break down barriers within Northern Ireland, and how the fostering of local talent helped to overcome cultural cringe. Longleys characteristically generous acknowledgment of the part played by others, whether forerunners such as Estyn Evans and John Hewitt, or contemporaries and successors such as Ciaran Carson and John Morrow includes a tribute to Morrow which is apt for Longley himself: a wise and hilarious man . . acutely tuned to the culture of his place. The poetic silence of the 1980s was then not a complete loss for Northern Irish society and culture but the coincidence of Longleys early retirement from the Arts Council with the publication of Gorse Fires, his first new volume in 12 years, suggests that the poetic and the bureaucratic voices could not speak simultaneously.
The dual emphasis of Longleys career in the Arts Council, to battle against both provincialism and what he referred to as cultural apartheid in his Introduction to Causeway: the Arts in Ulster (1971), alongside his continued residence in Belfast, and his description of art as itself a normal human activity with a duty to celebrate [and] commemorate normal human activities (close in spirit to Raymond Williams comment that culture is ordinary), may all conspire to suggest, paradoxically, that Longley is himself a rooted or even provincial figure. Nothing could be further from the truth as a list of the range of interests in the poetry demonstrates: the Great War, the Holocaust, commemoration as both theme and practice, music (jazz and classical), visual arts, love, friendship, the classics, elegy, list-making, and the natural world. Such a list could easily be extended and items on it can be sub-divided—the visual arts, for example, covers, among others, Raymond Piper, Pierre Bonnard, Robert Mapplethorpe, American quilts and Hokusai. The work is unified by a profound interest in the materiality of our lives, though this is never taken as limiting our potentialities. The theme of place seems an appropriate one on which to concentrate since it allows us to consider the unprovincial nature of the poetry, to recognise the distinctiveness of Longleys poetic voice, and to see the continuities across his poetry.
From its title onwards The Weather in Japan is continuous with Longleys previous work in its combination of apparent oppositions: an exotic locale is viewed from an apparently quotidian perspective. In turn, its short dedicatory poem contrasts two very different ideal villages—in Mayo and Italy—both seen as equally valid. Typically, this small poem ends with the idea that climbing up steps for a neighbourly nightcap could be the start of a journey towards the stars. In Longleys poetry, both the apparently exotic and the apparently homely open out into broader and more mysterious realms. There is an echo here of 'Epithalamion', the poem which opened Longleys first volume No Continuing City (1969). The setting may be domestic but this place cannot contain him:
weÉ
Inhabit so delightfully
A room it bursts its seams ('Epithalamion')
Space and time are equally subject to expansion and contraction; the poem combines a sense of beginnings and endings, a sense of the way in which human activity and its desired centre a home are subject to forces beyond the human.
For many contemporary Irish poets home is a problematic place, but Longleys attitude is distinctive. From the title of his first collection onwards the beginning of a new life is figured as departure and while there may be expressions of regret, there is no sense of dispossession, no sense of anxiety in regard to place. Being human we differ from the beasts because "they own/Those landscapes with which they are in keeping" ('Camouflage', Poems, 23) In 'Personal Statement', dedicated to Seamus Heaney, and partly a response to 'Personal Helicon', there is no sense of a need for a place around which the world can be organised. In the Longley poem self-containment is allied with "the litany of movement" (Poems 28), stability and restlessness co-exist. Restlessness, indeed, is evident from the outset in Longleys poetry. He may be a Belfast poet, but he is also attached to the West of Ireland, which aligns him with Yeats and MacNeice, but which in Longleys case, unlike that of MacNeice, carries little sense of fretfulness. One place is not a betrayal of the other, neither diminishes nor strengthens the other as home. There is in Longleys work no such place as a home of the kind that many other poets regret losing through dispossession or exile. Certain landscapes may confirm identity, though always only provisionally, as they are just as likely to be places of dispersal, where people disintegrate, and thought is ripped to tatters ('Landscape', Poems, 126) Longleys is a poetry in which the elision of nature and nation, of self and home, so frequent in Irish poetry, is disallowed by a sense of global interconnectedness.
Longleys poetry accepts the world as a modern place. His early work relies on the Odyssey to produce a persona who is out of touch, "a stranger to your islands" ('Odyssey', Poems, (Poems, 82). More radically in 'On Slieve Gullion' Longley recognises and rejects the literary associations of place. The reader, ignorant of the legends referred to, is not subjected to a Heaneyesque appeal to the social utility of lost associations, but shares rather the poets sense of being strangers here constrained to silence, because such associations, in their redemptive aspect, are from too long ago. Longley is an Odysseus for whom every landfall is a homecoming; like Darwin (the perfect stranger) he is a writer whose explorations of the foreign bring home to us who we are.
The poetry acknowledges, nevertheless, that contingent meanings and associations may be long-standing. His versions of Ovid in The Ghost Orchid stress continuity and slowness of change in the natural world: metamorphoses are about the slow shift from one state into another, a shift so slow and infinitesimal as to be beyond mere human narrative. This is a very modern appreciation of the nature of nature: the meaning of place has to be established rather than discovered or accepted, it is contingent rather than absolute. This is the Longley whose work Sean Lysaght places within the tradition of field natural science with its scientific nomenclature. His poetry refuses to anthropomorphise landscape: he is aware of the ways in which meaning attaches to place but he is aware of this as a human activity which impinges little on natural processes. For this reason Longleys recurrent metaphors can seem puzzling. One example, that of snow and ice (the former reminiscent of MacNeices "drunkenness of things being various"), indicates what I mean. Snow and coldness are surprisingly often associated with love, and with beds, but can equally (and perhaps more conventionally) be associated with death as in "He turns into a little snowman and refuses to melt" ('Ghetto IV', Gorse Fires, 41) or again in 'The Cenotaph' (The Weather in Japan, 26).
Longleys poetry refuses to privilege certain conventional meanings as frameworks within which people must live. Like Darwin, the homesick scientist of 'Galapagos' (Poems, 69), Longleys is a writing which seeks in its listing tendency to categorise without prematurely narrativising place and nature. As Darwin puts it: "I have an old belief that a good observer really means a good theorist". Nowhere is this more evident than in 'The Ice-Cream Man' (Gorse Fires, 49). This is an elegy not only for the eponymous murder victim but also for the lost language of flowers which might once have been used in such a poetic wreath ("Yarrow, ladys bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel"). This language is implied by but absent from the list of flower names as a lost iconography, plangently foreshadowed by a more modern list (of ice-cream flavours: "Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach") suggestive of ultimate fluidity. The poem is an attempt to establish meaning in the face of the brute reality of violence. At least part of its power derives from its title with its sense that the death of an ice-cream man, surely itself an emblem of fluidity and instability like those other snowmen mentioned earlier, is inevitable.
As Longley puts it elsewhere the whole story is one catalogue and then another ('Laertes', Gorse Fires, 33) and in this he strikes me as much like Darwin as described by Gillian Beer in Darwins Plots:
It is essential for Darwins theory that the multitudinousness of the natural world should flood through his language. His theory deconstructs any formulation which interprets the natural world as commensurate with mans understanding of it É This poignant tension [in The Origin] É a sense simultaneously of the natural world as exquisite and gross, rank and sensitive, constantly subverts the poise of any moralised description of it.
To put this another way: the pity, and the poetry, is in the detail.
Eamonn Hughes Eamonn Hughes lectures in the School of English at Queens.

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Snow Water

A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea
Connoisseur as well as a poet,
I modestly request on my sixtieth
Birthday a gift of snow water.

Tea steam and ink stains. Single-
Mindedly I scald my tea pot and
Measure out some Silver Needles Tea,
Enough for a second seeping.

Other favourites include Clear
Distance and Eyebrows of Longevity
Or, from precarious mountain peaks,
Cloud Mist Tea (quite delectable)

Which competent monkeys harvest
Filling their baskets with choice leaves
And bringing them down to where I wait
With my crock of snow water.

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Above Dooaghtry

Where the duach rises to a small plateau
That overlooks the sand dunes from Dooaghtry
To Roonkeel, and just beyond the cottage's
Higgledy perimeter fence-posts
At Carrigskeewaun, bury my ashes,

For the burial mound at Templedoomore
Has been erased by wind and sea, the same
Old stone-age sea that came as far inland
As Cloonaghmanagh and chose the place
That I choose as a promontory, a fort:

Let boulders at the top encircle me,
Neither a drystone wall nor a cairn, space
For the otter to die and the mountain hare
To lick snow stains from her underside,
A table for the peregrine and ravens,

A prickly double-bed as well, nettles
And carline-thistles, a sheeps' wool pillow,
So that, should she decide to join me there,
Our sandy dander to Allaran Point
Or Tonakeera will take for ever.

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Leaves

Is this my final phase? Some of the poems depend
Peaceably like the brown leaves on a sheltered branch.
Others are hanging on through the equinoctial gales
To catch the westering sun's red declension.
I'm thinking of the huge beech tree in our garden.
I can imagine foliage on fire like that.

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The Lizard

At the last restaurant on the road to Pisa airport
The only thing under the pergola to distract me
From gnocchi stuffed with walnuts in porcini sauce
Was a greeny lizard curving her belly like a bowl
So that when she tucked her hind legs behind her
In philosophical fashion and lifted up her hands
As though at prayer or in heated conversazione,
She wouldn't scorch her elegant fingers or toes
On the baking concrete and would feel the noon
As no more than a hot buckle securing her eggs.
We left the restaurant on the road to Pisa airport
And flew between Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn.
His lady co-pilot, the captain of our Boeing
Coyly let us know, specialised in smooth landings.

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The Pattern

Thirty-six years, to the day, after our wedding
When a cold figure-revealing wind blew against you
And lifted your veil, I find in its fat envelope
The six-shilling Vogue pattern for your bride's dress,
Complicated instructions for stitching bodice
And skirt, box pleats and hems, tissue paper outlines,
Semblances of skin which I nervously unfold
And hold up in snow-light, for snow has been falling
On this windless day, and I glimpe your wedding dress
And white shoes outside in the transformed garden
Where the clothes-line and every twig have been covered.

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The Pheasants

As though from a catastrophic wedding reception
The cock pheasant in his elaborate waistcoat
Exploded over cultivated ground to where
A car in front of our car had crushed his bride.

I got the picture in no time in my wing-mirror
As in a woodcut by Hokusai who highlighted
The head for me, the white neck-ring and red wattles,
The long coppery tail, the elegance and pain.

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The Strangford Stone

I
After the first fishy campsite
We people the drumlins of Lecale,
Building under the constellations
Stone circles to measure time,
Leaving behind us standing stones,
And from this side of the Narrows
We fathom the Violent Fjord
And listen to watery winds,
To oystercatcher and golden
Plover crying over our graves.

II
Again we begin with a big stone
And gather around Mourne granite's
Continuous present tense
To talk about ourselves and plan
How to cradle from the quarry
The column, the millennium,
How to plant the tonnage in the sky,
For we are a thousand and one
Who can together build heaven's
Gateway in our neighbourhood.

III
We put it up with our bare hands
In this smallholding, a home-made
Megalith, hope's big immovable
Standing stone, landmark for the lost,
Windbreak for the destitute, for
The unremembered and disappeared
A headstone, and for all the people
Who pause beneath and lift their eyes
A signpost pointing to the past
And another way, to paradise.

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