Close and Slow

A Weekly Appreciation of Poetry Pt.4

This week, my regular ‘Close and Slow’ poetry post will look slightly different. This is owing to the loss to Irish poetry last week of the towering figure of Michael Longley. It isn't easy to put into words just how significant and seminal Longley’s work is and how enduring his legacy as a man will be for generations to come. Others who knew him better have written powerfully about the poet and his work, notably Malachi O’Doherty in The Belfast Telegraph. This post is a light-touch reflection on my relationship with his work, with a brief appreciation for one of his later poems.

‘Meeting’ Michael Longley

My earliest exposure to Michael Longley came from three sources. The first was an RTE or BBC (I’m not sure which) documentary from the 1980s in which a group of poets interacted with Belfast singer-songwriter Van Morrison about his work. I was mad about Morrison’s music at that stage, and what struck me was the seriousness with which this group took Morrison’s output, as well as the easy grace with which they spoke about their work. I haven’t watched the documentary since the early 1990s, but I still remember Longley sharing about leaving a bucket of coal for honeymooners who were to take up residence in the holiday cottage that he and his family were vacating.

My second exposure came through The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, which I have shared about before here. Longley’s work felt like it was written in an altogether higher register than the poems I had previously encountered in this anthology and I was smitten by the plain beauty and power of his words, even though I didn’t fully grasp their meaning.

My third exposure came through being taught by Edna Longley in my final undergraduate year at Queens University Belfast. In the dizzying altitude of the upper floors of 1 University Square, Belfast, English students were treated to her module on ‘British and Irish Poetry: The Mid-Twentieth Century to Today’. This section of my course was an epiphany for me on the richness of a poetic body to be explored and the contextual framework for understanding it. I’m not sure if her husband Michael’s work was ever directly referenced in class (my abiding feeling is that it wasn’t) but I can remember having a sense for the first time that there was a community in Belfast for whom beauty, truth and literature were guiding stars.

For me, Belfast in those days was just awakening to the idea of peace, its limbs still cramped by the long and tortured sleep of 30 years, the nightmare of The Troubles giving way to the morning light of an end to conflict. Edna Longley had been one of the original 'Belfast Group’ and her exceptional acquaintance with British and Irish poetry persuaded me that there was a band of people in the city who formed a literary continuity across everything the city had seen. Her husband Michael’s shadow loomed large in this impression, a poet whose work could gaze long at the beauty of Mayo and who could speak powerfully to the fearful contradictions of the north.

In the intervening years, I have greatly enjoyed and highly esteemed Michael Longley’s work. I have also sensed that he was a kind of poetic mooring point for Northern writers, serving, as Seamus Heaney described him, as “a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders”.

In tribute to Michael Longley’s work, I want in this edition of ‘Close and Slow’ to lightly reflect on a very touching poem from his last published collection, The Slain Birds, from 2022. The poem is entitled ‘Nests':

Poems in conversation

The poetic career of Michael Longley can be roughly divided into two parts. It is a generalisation, but his early body of work is more attentive to form whereas his later work tends more towards the evocative, the musical and suggestive. A collected or selected edition of poems from Longley is a satisfying read, but there is no substitute for reading his individual collections as a whole. He held that the poems in any given book talked to one another, and this is arguably nowhere more true than in The Slain Birds. There is a sense of cohesion, of tender self-referentiality which makes the whole collection sing for itself, and stir the reader. The big themes of Longley’s career are present - nature, Carrigskeewaun in County Mayo, family, love, war and death - and are bound by a commitment to the turf he stands on and the people he shares it with.

Enquiring into the ‘soul-space’

The shadow of death visits the pages of The Slain Birds on several occasions, perhaps unsurprising given the fact that many of the poems were composed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The poem I have selected approaches this theme head-on, leaving instructions for what should follow his own passing. Longley saw love poetry as the hub of all other poetic work, and the addressee of this poem would seem to be his wife, Edna.

Several features stand out in the poem. The candour that characterised Longley’s work is obvious and evident from the very first line, as euphemisms around mortality are abandoned in favour of ‘When I die’. The poem also manages to centre the addressee rather than the poet, with the focus on their attentiveness to the world and their role as a custodian of the ‘soul-space’ left by Longley’s departure taking the foreground.

The reality of mourning is earthed in the natural world in which a sense of diligent enquiry characterises the recipient. Their focus is spatially enriched - peering into the depths of a well, gazing upwards at a swallow’s nest, discerning a mallard’s habitat in watery space - and is suggestive of hope and expectation. The addressee fixes their eye on places that are inaccessible, sacred almost, and that carry the possibility of new life despite their obscurity. Longley is tapping into the beloved predisposition of the one receiving the poem to search and seek and expend curiosity. If there is tribute in the poem it is not to the deceased but to the bereaved, with their indomitable concentration on life. This, he says, is how they are forever to look into ‘the soul-space’: with expectation, curiosity and an insistence on seeing.

Close my eyes, keep yours open

Michael Longley once described himself as a ‘sentimental disbeliever’, and I doubt that he would appreciate any attempt on the part of someone like me to ‘Christianise’ a poem like ‘Nests’. The emphasis of the piece is on mystery and on the fact that while our eyes close in death, those we love can keep theirs open to the world and to the possibilities that the ‘soul-space’ offers. These sentiments in themselves are beautiful, and typical of the originality and emotional depth of Longley’s work. This is a poem that liberates those who live beyond us to maintain wonder, to keep options open, and to be attentive to the emotional space opened by the lives of those we love.

In terms of reader response, my own Christian faith finds resonance with the search for life that the poem fosters, with its celebration of scrutinising space and time for something that transcends those dimensions. For me, this search carries its own dignity, as does its terminus in the life of Christ - the ultimate life-giver in a dying world.

Many readers will find their own responses to the poem, importing their griefs and hopes, beliefs and unbelief into their reading of it, but I am grateful for the unique agency of poetry to allow us into the kinds of spaces that Longley opens here.

The world is poorer for not having Michael Longley in it, but even as his eyes are closed on the world that he observed so closely and thoughtfully, his work allows us to keep ours wide open, watchful for life, and expectant that we might find it in places easily overlooked - in the deep spaces of the same world that he wondered at and that he set to the music of poetry.