Longley's development, in the four volumes from which [Selected Poems: 1963–1980] was culled, has been fairly unhesitating, or perhaps the major hesitations don't show in the verse he has wrested from those private ordeals in which a poet is shut in with the bull. (I might better say, shut in with W. B. Yeats!) To read these as forty-three undated poems is to admire the virtual absence of solecism. To realize that they were conceived and shaped over a period of seventeen years is to appreciate the struggle which must have accompanied and determined the lyric force and the fearless compassion that together define Longley's poetic profile. (pp. 155-56)

From [his second volume, An Exploded View,] on Longley is in command of a vocal affluence so consistently attuned that I hesitate before the numerous examples there are to offer: pastoral matters; brooding memorials for painters and poets and just...