Michael Longley.

 Michael Longley

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Books

Michael Longley, prize-winning poet of ‘griefs and wonders’, dies aged 85

Part of a gifted generation of writers from Northern Ireland, Longley also gave years of service to the province’s arts council

Lucy Knight

25 January 2025

Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, whom Seamus Heaney described as “a custodian of griefs and wonders”, has died aged 85, his publisher has confirmed. The writer, who won the TS Eliot prize in 2000 for his collection The Weather in Japan, died in hospital on Wednesday due to complications following a hip operation.

Robin Robertson, Longley’s longstanding editor, said it was “an honour to work with him … Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect.”

“He was the last of the great Northern Irish poetry triumvirate,” Robertson added. “He and his close friends, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, were part of a loose, convivial and brilliantly disparate group of young Irish writers (including Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon) who met in Philip Hobsbaum’s “Belfast Group” in the early 1960s. [Longley, Heaney and Mahon] published their debut collections that decade and went on to become major international poets.”

Claire Hanna, MP for South Belfast and Mid Down, said she was “heartbroken” by the news in a post on X, describing Longley as a “prince of language.”

“He transcended narrow categories of ‘Irish’ & ‘British’ and was a beautiful person – kind, generous, open, humorous,” she added.

Born in Belfast in 1939, Longley was one of twin boys – his brother, a marine engineer, died a decade ago, an event that inspired the second half of the poet’s 2014 collection, The Stairwell. “These are poems that get under the skin,” wrote Kate Kellaway in her Observer review of that collection. “With the mastery of years of writing, Longley knows the shortcuts to the heart.”

 Longley studied classics at Trinity College Dublin, where he realised that all he wanted to do was write poetry. “Perhaps I had the vaguest notion of sleepwalking into teaching or the civil service,” he told the Guardian in a 2004 interview. “But I was bitten by the poetry bug. The first poetry I wrote as an undergraduate was splurges of emotion. But I remember taking one of these splurges and trying to make it into two sonnets, which took from about six in the evening until nine the following morning. That kind of challenge was addictive.”

Alongside writing poetry – his first collection, Ten poems, was published in 1965 – Longley worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as combined arts director for many years. He wrote his most famous poem, Ceasefire, in 1994, in the hope of an end to the Troubles. The day after it was published, a ceasefire was announced.

Longley’s poetry won him a number of prizes and accolades, including the Whitbread prize in 1991 for his collection Gorse Fires, a CBE in 2010 and the Feltrinelli International Poetry prize for a lifetime’s achievement in 2022.

In 2017, Longley was announced winner of the PEN Pinter prize, which is awarded annually to a writer who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world. That year’s chair of judges, the poet Don Paterson, described Longley’s body of work as “effortlessly lyric and fluent poetry” that has been “wholly suffused with the qualities of humanity, humility and compassion, never shying away from the moral complexity that comes from seeing both sides of an argument.”

In 1964, Longley married the critic and academic Edna Longley, who had given him his first review in a student newspaper. In a BBC documentary last year, Longley said that when he finished a poem he would celebrate with a dance – “whoopee, whoopee” – before asking Edna for feedback: “Nine times out of 10 they’re good suggestions.”

The poet’s most recent collection, the Candlelight Master, was published in 2022, poems described by Guardian reviewer Aingeal Clare as “teemingly alive”. Longley is survived by Edna and the couple’s three children.

THE GUARDIAN

Michael Longley / If I k new ejerce poens

 

“If I knew where poems come from. I'd go there.” 

Michael Longley 

'The Observer ' article March 24 1991

18 JANUARY 2024

John Clare out of Copyright

Simon Kövesi

‘It was not very manly of you to evade telling me what you had been up to when we met today,’ the late Eric Robinson wrote to me on 10 July 1999. What I’d ‘been up to’ was editing and publishing a paperback edition of John Clare’s Love Poems with a small outfit in Bangkok. I presented it on a table at the John Clare Society Festival in Helpston, where Robinson cast me withering looks, not least because I had prodded Boyd Tonkin, then at the Independent, to write a column about my book the day before. The headline said: ‘The people’s poet must be set free.’

Clare died in 1864. Selections of his work were published by Norman Gale (1901), Arthur Symons (1908), Edmund Blunden (1920, 1924 and 1931), J.W. and Anne Tibble (1935 and 1951) and Geoffrey Grigson (1949 and 1950). These editors drew on the collections of Clare’s papers held by public libraries in Peterborough and Northampton, with other manuscripts in the New York Public Library. In 1965, however, things changed, when Robinson bought what he claimed was the copyright to everything Clare had written except the four books published in his lifetime.

Robinson’s proof of ownership was a receipt from Whitaker’s, who sold him ‘all rights whatsoever possessed by the Company in the published and unpublished work’. Joseph Whitaker, the Victorian publisher and founder of Whitaker’s Almanack, had bought the copyright to Clare’s unpublished work along with manuscript materials from his widow, Patty. Peterborough Museum bought all of Whitaker’s Clare manuscripts in 1893, and believed itself to be in possession of the copyright, too. Whitaker’s original purchase surfaced in 1932 but was destroyed along with the rest of the firm’s archive in the Blitz – but by that time no one claimed or considered any copyright to the publicly held unpublished work. The cost of Robinson’s purchase in 1965 was £1. As he told the THES, it was a ‘brilliant piece of entrepreneurial effort’.

Robinson, who taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, was a pioneering editor, cutting a new path through the mass of complex papers. His nine-volume edition of Clare’s works appeared between 1984 and 2003 from the Clarendon Press. But he compounded that dedicated scholarly work with his scheme of private copyright ownership, which he asserted with ruthless vigour. He stopped other people publishing Clare, or made them pay him, and he required final approval of the way Clare’s texts were to be presented. If anyone wanted access to the manuscripts for publishing purposes, the libraries would direct them to Robinson as copyright holder.

Some people paid. George Deacon gave Robinson a substantial amount for the rights to Clare’s musical manuscripts (Clare wrote music and played the fiddle) so that he could publish transcriptions of them in his book John Clare and the Folk Tradition in 1983. Deacon still holds that copyright, as the composer Julian Philips and I found out a couple of years ago, when we were working on an album of recordings of Philips’s reworkings of Clare’s folk songs, interlaced with readings by the actor Toby Jones. To clear the publishing rights we had to give Deacon a share of the royalties.

I published my selection of Clare’s poems in 1999 deliberately to challenge Robinson’s copyright claim. I wanted to get the case into court. A legal spat over a dead poet is usually something to avoid: the stakes are small but the risks are considerable. I was lucky to have the backing of a publisher who had been in a Thai prison for libel – Michael Gorman, the former editor of the Bangkok Post – and he wanted to push our case all the way.

Many of us who worked on Clare found it unacceptable that one person claimed to ‘own’ the poet. Not only had Robinson appointed himself gatekeeper to Clare’s work, but his copyright claim was used to defend one version of the work – the politics of editing Clare’s non-standard English is contested ground – and it prevented other scholars from presenting alternative selections and editorial versions of Clare. If it turned out the law supported Robinson’s claim, then we would push for the law to be changed.

And so I published my selection, and received the letter from Robinson telling me I was ‘not very manly’ a few days later. Would it have been more ‘manly’ to ask his permission? I didn’t understand. But I knew what was coming, and in November 1999 I received a formal threat of legal action from Robinson’s lawyers, seeking damages and a declaration that I would not infringe his copyright. We replied asking Robinson to prove his ownership. The response was slow and, to our eyes, proved nothing. We waited, and went public again. There was a fierce exchange of letters in the TLS in the summer of 2000, followed by silence – and no legal action.

So we published another small selection, of Clare’s Flower Poems, in 2001. Again the legal threats arrived, again we asked for proof. Robinson complained publicly at the abuse and disrespect he said we were guilty of, and campaigned to get me kicked out of the Clare Society. The Society’s president, the late Ronald Blythe, rebuffed the attempt. Robinson’s last public word on the copyright issue was in 2003 in the Guardian: in ‘respect of these [unpublished] works’, he asserted, ‘only I can lawfully publish them.’ He died in 2019, and things became more confusing for the libraries housing the manuscripts, as they had no idea to whom they should direct people seeking to publish Clare’s work.

So it is with some relief that I have recently learned that neither Victoria Robinson, Eric’s widow, nor his literary agent, Curtis Brown, are maintaining his claim to own the copyright in Clare’s works. Robinson’s legacy is secure: his rigorous scholarly editions, born of a lifetime’s dedication to the poet, are the bedrock of contemporary Clare scholarship. But now that the long saga of the disputed copyright claim is finally over, a new generation of editors can get to work on Clare’s poems, and freely so.

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Quantum Theory by Chelsea Dignan

QUANTUM THEORY
by Chelsea Digman

I’ve been trying not to live my life
only in response to death. And yet.

Across the world, a bridge collapses
twenty years ago. Cars fall into the sea.

Today, I write a case study.
It’s too late too often

to do anything worth doing. After work,
in the woods behind the house

I step over a fallen tree. The living trees
stand listening. I am small

again. It has always been so.
It might not matter if I believe in time

soon. The trees tell me
I’ll live forever

in darkness, in daylight.
The echo of which is holy.

 

 

---

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw(Georgia), won the National Poetry Series; her second, Through a Small Ghost (Georgia), won the Georgia Poetry Prize; her third book is I, Divided (LSU). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta.

IMAGE

Summer Kitchen by Donald Hall

 

«Summer Kitchen»

by Donald Hall

In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

«It’s ready now. Come on,» she said.
«You light the candle.»
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.

Juan Manuel Roca / Days as needled

 

Two Poems by Joel Dias-Porter

 

Two Poems

Don’t stuff your fingers
in your ears or count the Pentecost.
Don’t ask if that grammar has a rosary
or recipe written in cornrows on her head.

Joel Dias-Porter

• 
  
  
  May 31, 2024

An Idea of Improvisation with
An Echolocation of Blackness
(after ashes)

A mythical village filled with echoes
of talking drums from Ibadan,
or the sweet potatoes that root
as some still dream of planting yams?
The musk of a hand carved mask,
or a funky lover feeling bituminous?
Could you spot it perhaps on the spectrum?
Do y’all hum or alhamdulillah?
O Lorde—do we decide to star it or tar it
as others have tried to find asphalt
in our absence of photons or perhaps
recite [carbon & oxygen & aluminum]
tho not as a ploy of blaxploitation
where most of the kinks got afro-picked out
and what was left only looked like a globe.
Or a melanite halo if some hot Mama needs
to braid or lay her baby hair for miles ahead
with [boron & lanthanum & carbon
& potassium & neon & sulfur & sulphur].
The elemental truth is—some may never know.
And yet, don’t we still whisper to cross it
as if fingers or streets or an ocean
—to seek a return to the orishas tho
I often think they overhear.
So what. Don’t stuff your fingers
in your ears or count the Pentecost.
Don’t ask if that grammar has a rosary
or recipe written in cornrows on her head.
Instead, address a question of the talking drum
—in what dream of eggshell shoes
could these midnight blues even indigo?

 

An Idea of Improvisation for Violin and Viola
(after Hilary Hahn)

Like if
one of our fingers
tries to cause a slide
or fall in pitch
to rise into a query
or they seek
to caress or pinch
a fret until certain sounds
begin to unpeel
from two citrus bodies
—say a blood or
navel orange—
but not a sound
as in long passage
connecting two bodies
of water below
a duvet of darkness
or waves from
a beloved’s lips
in the leaps
of a ghazal
alongside the sea
of a secret which
—when you toss
your hair that way—
seems to flicker like
what in better light
some might call
abandon.

But perhaps,
perhaps, as if
somehow tonight
—as orange petals
warm the air
above a wick—
we sit close beside
a Trouble Clef
which even as
it knows it shouldn’t
begins to curl
into a silk scarf of sigh
—pianissimo as violets—
to perhaps warn
a bare stretch of arm
or thigh or neck
of what surely lies
beneath certain muscles
which may or may not
mimic a blood or
navel orange’s
quiet tremble—
as if only until dawn,
as if only until taken
or mistaken for
something which
—in flickering light—
could seem prone to rise or fall
like a lip of chrysanthemum
on a ridge of collarbone.

Joel Dias-Porter

Joel Dias-Porter lives in South Jersey. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Mead, Best American Poetry 2014, Callaloo, Asahi Shimbun, Ploughshares, and the New York Times, as well as many anthologies.

BOSTON REVIEW