Collected Poems
Starred Review.Despite (or because of) sectarian violence, Belfast in the late '60s and '70s produced a brace of extraordinary poetic talents. Among them, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon moved to America and achieved international stardom, while Longley remained in Northern Ireland, developing a subtle power of his own, as this first retrospective since 1985 shows. Longley's debut volume,No Continuing City(1969), made clear his careful mastery of form, but not untilMan Lying on a Wall(1976) did he establish his recognizable style: Longley's short, segmented poems and sinuous lines, often approximating Latin hexameters, exhibit an understated beauty, and yet remain conscious of violence past and present, from the Trojan War through WWI and Northern Ireland's Troubles. An archetypal elegy depicts "shell cases from the last war filled with flowers." War—what it does to combatants and to their children—becomes a preoccupation throughout Longley's work, especially in the hauntedGorse Fires(1991) and the mellifluousSnow Water(2004). Yet marital love and tenderness, domestic calm and pastoral counterpoise also stand among Longley's signature subjects: "the fireflies at the waterfall, a well of stars." Longley's genius is pastoral and commemorative, summed up perhaps in this recent one-line poem: "my lost lamb lovelier than all the wool."(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.