“... everyone has responded so warmly. In a memorably acerbic review of the Collected Poems in 1979, Edna Longley damned such passages as lapses into ‘the higher waffle’ and wrote that they ‘would not look out of place in the Thribb anthology’. Graham took the verdict on the chin: the notices for the book had generally been good, he reported to his ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... critics. The part they played has been recognised in this centenary year by the reissue of Michael Longley’s perceptive, beautifully introduced Selected Poems and by the addition of a fine preface by Derek Mahon to The Strings Are False. It would be good to have back in print Edna Longley’s study of 1988 which did ...”