Michael Longley, a Belfast poet "of exceptional poise and eloquence--but with a sardonic streak to temper his technical accomplishment," died January 22 at age 85, the Guardian reported. "For more than half a century, Longley was an exemplary practitioner of the art of poetry, and, in his later years, something of a 'grand old man' of letters."
Longley's many books included The Echo Gate (1979) and Gorse Fires (1991), which was the first of nine full-length collections appearing between 1991 and 2022, "all displaying an increasing mastery and depth of feeling (alongside a robust repudiation of what the poet labelled 'mad dog shite,' in work or in life). Each new collection drew a round of applause for its continuing 'subtlety, emotional power and rhythmic and musical resource,' among other virtues," the Guardian wrote. Longley's latest collection, The Slain Birds (2022), "exemplifies his undying preoccupation with nature and natural forces." Ash Keys: New Selected Poems was published in 2024 to coincide with his 85th birthday.
A member of the Irish Association of Artists, Aosdána, he was appointed CBE in 2010. For many years, Longley worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as combined arts director. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He won the Whitbread Prize in 1991 for Gorse Fires and the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Irish Times Poetry Prize in 2000 for The Weather in Japan. He also received the Librex Montale Prize, the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, the Yakamochi Medal, the International Roma Prize, and in 2015 the international Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2022, he was awarded the Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime's achievement.
Describing Longley as "a key figure in contemporary poetry," the Bookseller quoted Robin Robertson, his long-standing editor at Jonathan Cape: "I knew and admired Michael Longley's poetry before joining Secker & Warburg in the late 1980s, and so it was an honor to work with him on his books from Gorse Fires in 1991 until his new selected poems, Ash Keys.... Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect."
When Longley was presented with the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017, chair of the judges Don Paterson said: "For decades now his effortlessly lyric and fluent poetry 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."
