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2025-01-23 16:21:00
Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, whom Seamus Heaney described as “a custodian of griefs and wonders”, has died aged 85, his writer has confirmed. The author, who received the TS Eliot prize in 2000 for his assortment The Climate in Japan, died in hospital on Wednesday as a result of problems following a hip operation.
Robin Robertson, Longley’s longstanding editor, stated it was “an honour to work with him … Not that I needed to work very exhausting, as each poem was near good.”
“He was the final of the good Northern Irish poetry triumvirate,” Robertson added. “He and his shut pals, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, have been a part of a unfastened, convivial and brilliantly disparate group of younger Irish writers (together with Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon) who met in Philip Hobsbaum’s “Belfast Group” within the early Nineteen Sixties. [Longley, Heaney and Mahon] revealed their debut collections that decade and went on to grow to be main worldwide poets.”
Claire Hanna, MP for South Belfast and Mid Down, stated she was “heartbroken” by the information in a put up on X, describing Longley as a “prince of language.”
“He transcended slim classes of ‘Irish’ & ‘British’ and was a wonderful individual – sort, beneficiant, open, humorous,” she added.
Born in Belfast in 1939, Longley was considered one of twin boys – his brother, a marine engineer, died a decade in the past, an occasion that impressed the second half of the poet’s 2014 assortment, The Stairwell. “These are poems that get below the pores and skin,” wrote Kate Kellaway in her Observer evaluate of that assortment. “With the mastery of years of writing, Longley is aware of the shortcuts to the center.”
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Longley studied classics at Trinity School Dublin, the place he realised that every one he needed to do was write poetry. “Maybe I had the vaguest notion of sleepwalking into educating or the civil service,” he advised the Guardian in a 2004 interview. “However I used to be bitten by the poetry bug. The primary poetry I wrote as an undergraduate was splurges of emotion. However I keep in mind taking considered one of these splurges and attempting to make it into two sonnets, which took from about six within the night till 9 the next morning. That sort of problem was addictive.”
Alongside writing poetry – his first assortment, Ten poems, was revealed in 1965 – Longley labored for the Arts Council of Northern Eire as mixed arts director for a few years. He wrote his most well-known poem, Ceasefire, in 1994, within the hope of an finish to the Troubles. The day after it was revealed, a ceasefire was introduced.
Longley’s poetry received him various prizes and accolades, together with the Whitbread prize in 1991 for his assortment Gorse Fires, a CBE in 2010 and the Feltrinelli Worldwide Poetry prize for a lifetime’s achievement in 2022.
In 2017, Longley was introduced winner of the PEN Pinter prize, which is awarded yearly to a author who, within the phrases of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an “unflinching, dependable” gaze upon the world. That 12 months’s chair of judges, the poet Don Paterson, described Longley’s physique of labor as “effortlessly lyric and fluent poetry” that has been “wholly suffused with the qualities of humanity, humility and compassion, by no means shying away from the ethical complexity that comes from seeing either side of an argument.”
In 1964, Longley married the critic and tutorial Edna Longley, who had given him his first evaluate in a scholar newspaper. In a BBC documentary final 12 months, Longley stated that when he completed a poem he would rejoice with a dance – “whoopee, whoopee” – earlier than asking Edna for suggestions: “9 instances out of 10 they’re good recommendations.”
The poet’s most up-to-date assortment, the Candlelight Grasp, was revealed in 2022, poems described by Guardian reviewer Aingeal Clare as “teemingly alive”. Longley is survived by Edna and the couple’s three kids.
