Like the trees on Primrose Hill

Samuel Hynes

  • Louis MacNeice: A Study by Edna Longley
    Faber, 178 pp, £4.95, August 1988, ISBN 0 571 13748 2
  • Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems edited by Michael Longley
    Faber, 160 pp, £4.95, August 1988, ISBN 0 571 15270 8
  • A Scatter of Memories by Margaret Gardiner
    Free Association, 280 pp, £15.95, November 1988, ISBN 1 85343 043 9

In ‘The Cave of Making’, his elegy for MacNeice, Auden describes his friend as a ‘lover of women and Donegal’. The geography seems a bit wrong – the Irish counties in MacNeice’s heart were surely Antrim and Galway – but the terms are apt enough for the man in the poems: a lover, certainly, and of both women and the land of his birth. A full list of his loves would have to be longer than Auden’s, though. It would go on to include many other affections that composed his life: for friends, London, rugby, drink, Classical languages, fast cars, idle talk, clichés, pubs, and not most of all, perhaps, but most of the time – poetry.

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