Michael Longley’s Ash Keys: New Selected Poems will be published later this year.
What’s the Greek for boat, You ask, old friend, Fellow voyager Approaching Ithaca – Oh, flatulent sails, Wave-winnowing oars, Shingle-scrunching keel – But, so close to home, There’s a danger always Of amnesiac storms, Waterlogged words.
Marigolds, 1960You are dying. Why do we fight? You find my first published poem – ‘Not worth the paper it’s...
I’m thinking of the pope and you, Eddie, As I dander towards the New York Public Library to peek at the field notebooks Of Edward Thomas wandering in England In pursuit of spring before poetry and war. Somewhere between Dorval and La Guardia I encountered John Paul among the clouds Like a surge of energy from the engines. Now he lies stiff and full of...
Sarah drew a hare under a sky full of large stars When she was ten: now, more than a childhood later, In antique Paraty where the sea seeps up the street Depositing between boulder-sized cobbles sand And the feathers of snowy egrets and frigate birds, We meet the hare again, an ‘indigenous artefact’, And want to know everything about the animal, Its crouching body...
Why, my dear octogenarian Jewish friend, Does the menagerie of minuscule glass animals On top of your TV set not include a skunk? I have been travelling around in America, Sleeping in wooden houses with squeaky floors, Landings hung with pictures of lost relatives, Professors, station-masters, wise embroiderers. Driving along the Delaware my poet-host Stops to let two wild turkeys...
He would have been a hundred today, my father, So I write to him in the trenches and describe How he lifts with tongs from the brazier an ember And in its glow reads my words and sets them aside.
The Mustard TinYou are dying and not sleeping soundly because Your eyes stay open and it doesn’t seem to hurt. We want you to blink and find three of us standing For a few...
By spring 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his...
As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but...
The West of Ireland is a good place in which to hide. Fast-moving columns of sun and rain cause landmarks to appear and disappear; the roads have potholes which could hide the many vagrant...
‘Dates, dates are of the essence; and it will be found that I date quite exactly the breakdown of the imaginative exploit of the Cantos: between the completion of the late sequence called...
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...
Recently I received a somewhat smug letter from one of the editors of PN Review asking me to contribute to yet another symposium on the state of critical chassis which still persists in Great...
Derek Mahon’s Poems 1962 – 1978 includes most of his three earlier books, to which he has added a few uncollected poems and about 35 pages of new work. Readers will discover that...
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