Michael Longley is one of a number of Northern Irish poets who established a reputation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though his poetry is less well known than that of his contemporary Seamus Heaney, he has many admirers who respond to the...

THE NORTHERN Irish poet Michael Longley has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry, one of the rarest British honours for literary achievement. He joins a small and select band of recipients over the past 60 years, including Robert Graves, Ted Hughes,...

Among the distinguished poets from Northern Ireland who matured in the long era of sectarian violence known as The Troubles--a cohort that includes Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon--Michael Longley is the pure lyric artist. Lucidity, economy, sincerity: Longley strives toward these goals by...

The early poems of Michael Longley … are the work of a self-conscious, urban sophisticate for whom Ireland as a possible poetic subject scarcely exists. Indeed his first volume, No Continuing City (1969), contained only one poem on an explicitly Irish subject. In that collection we enter a world of private associations, of wit, intelligence and formal relations. Elaborate metaphysical conceits are skilfully worked, an instinct for subjective allegory is indulged, while the central properties of the p...

Michael Longley is a patient, properly ambitious poet who has worked hard to achieve a distinctive style without appearing to question his deep trust in the resources of formality and pattern. His early poems are sometimes rather strenuous exercises in craftsmanship, models of determination which become exhausted by their refusal to stop until an argument has been pressed home; but the monotony of their attentuated structures is at the same time evidence of an admirable seriousness, a readiness to demonstra...

[In An Exploded View, Michael Longley] gives the impression of not wanting to take History or politics too seriously, but at the same time admitting that he has a responsibility to subjects under his nose. In "Casualty" he shows himself to be as willing as [John] Montague to fabricate a notion of the irrational-historical, and by so doing he abdicates the right to say whether contemporary events are good or bad. Like Montague, he appeals to an Unknown, a "something." All that�...