Michael Longley, Islip, 2016

Michael Longley CBE, one of Northern Ireland’s most cherished poets, passed away on 22 January 2025 at the age of 85, following complications from hip surgery.

Over five decades, Michael produced thirteen major collections (including Gorse Fires, The Weather in Japan, The Stairwell, and The Slain Birds), each marked by a graceful lyricism, metrical precision, and a profound sense of witness. He was the recipient of nearly every significant poetry prize: the 1991 Whitbread Prize for Gorse Fires, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, Hawthornden Prize, and the 2000 TS Eliot Prize for The Weather in Japan. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, was appointed CBE in 2010, and in 2022 he won the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.

As a public figure, he held the cross-border position of Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010. He worked almost twenty years at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, helping to shape the literary and traditional arts landscape of Ireland. In 2015 he was honored as a Freeman of Belfast and a beloved member of Aosdána, Ireland’s academy of artists.

Michael was born in Belfast on 27 July 1939 to Richard and Constance Longley. Richard was a decorated veteran of the First World War (awarded the Military Cross), and gained the rank of Major. His wartime experiences would find echoes in his son's poetry. Michael was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, then studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin. At Trinity, he formed lifelong friendships with fellow-poets Derek Mahon, a fellow 'Inst' graduate, and Brendan Kennelly, and there met his future wife and constant intellectual companion, Edna Broderick. Edna was studying English with Classics, and so sat in some of the same classes with Michael, and both worked on the college’s literary journal, Icarus. As a rigorous critic and scholar, Edna came to play an essential role in nurturing his prose and poetry: Michael once admitted without her, ‘my oeuvre would be three times the size’.

Michael was an important member of the Belfast Group, which he joined when he returned to Belfast in 1964, a year after its founding at Queen’s University Belfast by Philip Hobsbaum. A ‘reluctant joiner’ at first, he became a mainstay, along with close friends, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Heaney, who assumed leadership of The Belfast Group after Hobsbaum left, remarked that Michael was admired as a ‘custodian of griefs and wonders’. Though sectarian griefs took Michael by surprise: ‘As a middle-class Protestant I’d always thought this sort of thing could never happen, and here it was – it had happened’.[1]

In his sonnet, ‘Ceasefire’ (1994), he reimagines the final episode of Homer’s Iliad – when King Priam pleads with Achilles for the body of his son Hector – and uses it to reflect upon the contemporary violence engulfing Northern Ireland. By invoking Achilles and Priam’s moment of grief and reconciliation, he draws a direct line between Homeric Greece, the sacrifices of the Somme (through his family memory), and the brutal reality of sectarian conflict at home in Belfast.

Ceasefire
(from The Ghost Orchid, Jonathan Cape, 1998)

I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

II
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
to stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam goodlooking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

IV
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’

Maurice Riordan noted the clear imprint of Robert Graves in Longley’s supple craftsmanship and classical register. Longley was a devoted Graves reader, and produced an acclaimed volume of Graves’s poems, Selected Poems, in 2013, in whose introduction he recalls his youthful enthusiasm as an undergrad at Trinity College ‘inhaling’ Graves’s poetry beside poet, Derek Mahon.

When Derek Mahon and I were undergraduates at Trinity College Dublin, we inhaled poetry with our Sweet Afton cigarettes. From the beginning Robert Graves emerged as one of our heroes. We read his poems aloud to each other, counting the beats with our hands and scattering cigarette ash into the gulley of the 1959 Collected Poems. […] After fifty years, the poems we loved then have lost none of their radiance: they continue to astonish, and are the heartbeat of his selection. (p. xiii)

Central among the many wonders in his oeuvre are Michael’s love poems, many dedicated to Edna. They rank among the century’s finest: unshowy, tender, devoted.

The Pattern

(From Snow Poems, Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Thirty-six years, to the day, after our wedding

When a cold figure-revealing wind blew against you

And lifted your veil, I find in its fat envelope

The six-shilling Vogue pattern for your bride’s dress,

Complicated instructions for stitching bodice

And skirt, box pleats and hems, tissue-paper outlines,

Semblances of skin, which I nervously unfold

And hold up in snow light, for snow has been falling

On this windless day, and I glimpse your wedding dress

And white shoes outside in the transformed garden

Where the clothesline and every twig have been covered.

Michael also influenced and inspired a generation as teacher, editor, arts advocate, and a friend of younger writers like Catriona O’Reilly, David Wheatley, and Leontia Flynn, who remember him as a model of gentleness, wit, humility, and an unstinting commitment to craft.

His passing was mourned at a service in Belfast’s All Souls Church, attended by President Michael D. Higgins, politicians, friends, poets, and readers. Higgins described him as ‘one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced’ and suggested his work could have merited a Nobel prize.

Fran Brearton began her eulogy with these words:

[Michael] bequeaths to us a body of work breathtaking in its lyric perfection and its profound humanity. It’s as if his poems have always been here, as naturally formed as the ash keys scattering or the whooper swans flying overhead, so much part of the fabric of our lives it is impossible to remember poetry without him.[2]

Survived by Edna, their three children – Rebecca, Daniel, and Sarah – and seven grandchildren, Michael leaves behind a poetic inheritance extraordinary in its refinement, humanity, and moral power. His last collection, The Slain Birds (2022), was followed by Ash Keys: New Selected Poems in July 2024, celebrating over fifty years of poetry and poems.