Michael Longley

Michael Longley Poems

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.
...

We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
...

Pulling up flax after the blue flowers have fallen
And laying our handfuls in the peaty water
To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks
...

This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison's tractor,
...

You showed me my twin's feet when he was dead,
Your sailor-husband's feet, your engineer's - how
Cold they felt, how handsome ankle and toe,
...

As if a one-room schoolhouse were all we knew
And our clothes were black, our underclothes black,
Marriage a horse and buggy going to church
...

Inauspicious between headstones
On Angel Hill, wintry love
Tokens for Murdo, Alistair,
...

Dear old brother-in-law, I've flown home
Across the Atlantic. I'm far away, but you
...

A wintry night, the hearth inhales
And the chimney becomes a windpipe
Fluffy with soot and thistledown,
...

Let me make room for bog cotton, a desert flower -
Keith Douglas, I nearly repeat what you were saying
When you apostrophised the poppies of Flanders
...

Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
...

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
...

The spear-point pierces his tender neck.
His armour clatters as he hits the ground.
Blood soaks his hair, bonny as the Graces',
...

My father, let no similes eclipse
Where crosses like some forest simplified
Sink roots into my mind, the slow sands
...

Your uncle, totem and curator bends
Above your cot. It is you I want to see.
Your cry comes out like an eleison.
...

The freeze-up annexes the sea even,
Putting out over the waves its platform.
Let skies fall, the fox's belly cave in -
...

And, summing up, I think of when
With cloud and cloudburst you confer,
By God's sheer genius lifted there,
...

Lighting up, lest all our hearts should break,
His fiftieth cigarette of the day,
Happy with so many notes at his beck
...

These are the small hours when
Moths by their fatal appetite
Which thatbrings them tapping to get in,
...

Amateur witches and professional virgins,
Sirens and shepherdesses - all new areas
Of experience (I have been out of touch) -
...

Michael Longley Biography

Michael Longley, CBE (born 27 July 1939) is a poet from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Born in Belfast, Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. He was Professor of Poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010, a cross-border academic post set up in 1998, previously held by John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Durcan. He was succeeded in 2010 by Harry Clifton. North American editions of Longley's work are published by Wake Forest University Press. His wife, Edna Longley, is a critic on modern Irish and British poetry. They have three children. An atheist, he describes himself as a "sentimental" disbeliever. On 14 January 2014, Longley participated in the BBC Radio 3 series "The Essay - Letters to a Young Poet". Taking Rainer Maria Rilke's classic text, Letters to a Young Poet as inspiration, leading poets wrote a letter to a protege. Awards: Gorse Fires (1991) won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The Weather in Japan (2000) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Queen's University Belfast (1995) and Trinity College, Dublin (1999) and was the 2001 recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Longley was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours. He won a 2011 London Awards for Art and Performance. His collection, A Hundred Doors, won the Poetry Now Award in September 2012. His 2014 collection The Stairwell won the 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize. in 2015, he received the Ulster Tattler Lifetime Achievement Award.)

The Best Poem Of Michael Longley

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 teapot and
Measure out some Silver Needles Tea,
Enough for a second steeping.

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.

Michael Longley Comments

Luca Andersonmuller 04 December 2020

Knew my grandpa, absolute baller!

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