“... Michael Longley​ died a year and a half ago, at which point, as Auden put it in his elegy for Yeats, ‘he became his admirers.’ As happens with any great poet, what those admirers had long appreciated as a succession of fine individual poems and volumes unobtrusively reorganised itself into the completed order of a life’s work ...”

“... naming, one thing at a time: fieldfare, redshank, cranesbill, alchemilla. A Duck Island Flora For Michael Longley On the road to the Brensholmen ferry: snow gentians, mineral blue and perfect, like a child’s idea of north; but here is all marshland and water between the fields where they still cut and rake the hay with tools that are heirlooms. Two ...”

“... a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a split, presumably in the hope of establishing that ...”

“... collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not many. No, MacNeice’s importance for current Northern Irish poets must have more to do with the kind of poetry he ...”

“... them. It must also mean constant expectations and pressures that have constantly to be resisted. Michael Longley has acknowledged that a poet ‘would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community, and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively’ – and if the latter part of that sentence means ...”

“... from a shared tragedy and yet they are full of wonder, instinct with a firm and obdurate courage. Michael Longley belongs to that epic and heroic generation of Northern Irish poets who brought the Word to a province where Minotaur snarled at art and banned plays that criticised the status quo. His first volume, No Continuing City, was published in 1969 ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has ...”

“... are, of course, Irish, and yet they are queerly aligned, or disjointed, and sometimes irascibly. Michael Longley’s Irishness is more affirmed than Mahon’s, and it is enriched by the poets of the Roman Silver Age. There’s a tender lyricism in him, and a love of the Irish countryside, its people, customs, flowers and creatures. The Echo Gate is his ...”

“... fear and hate, these ambivalences guarantee that the poem is the genuine article. But although Michael Longley has looked out a number of early and unpublished poems to give this well-made selection some appropriate roughness, the overall feeling is that these are poems whose ambivalences have been rather carefully polished for public presentation. In ...”

“... terms a pamphlet of mine, published in Belfast as part of a series that included Seamus Deane, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker, James Simmons, and several other Northern Irish poets whose voices were beginning to raise themselves in the mid-Sixties. To hear John Carey now, almost a quarter of a century later, go farther still along that ...”

“... Carson, McGuckian ... the list goes on. Perhaps the most singular omission, though, is that of Michael Longley, whose Poems 1963-83, issued last year by the Salamander Press, shows a poet of incomparable fluency and discernment. When it comes to the Heaney selection (five poems), Kinsella has been rather unenterprising: nothing at all from Station ...”

“... important affinity’ between Marvell and the ‘gifted group of Ulster poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon’ – poets surely very unlike the Member of Parliament for Hull. He asserts that ‘many of these are creatively grateful to Marvell,’ and then suggests, even more extravagantly, that ‘it is likely that ...”

“... Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged ...”

“... English poetry last had in the Thirties. The way in which poets as diverse as Heaney, Muldoon, Longley, McGuckian, Carson and Mahon are to a certain degree sustained by a single symbolic world is something that poets like Armitage and Maxwell are trying to copy. In Maurice Riordan’s first collection, A Word From the Loki, the title poem reflects the ...”

“... of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh Kenner’s new ...”