Michael Longley obituary

In 1994, when rumours of an IRA ceasefire began to circulate, Michael Longley sat down and wrote what came to be regarded as one of the most prescient and significant poems of the Troubles era. Called Ceasefire, it was published originally in the Irish Times and had an immediate impact, with its much-quoted final couplet standing as a symbol of hope and reconciliation in fraught times: “I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”

In this poem, Longley, who has died aged 85, drew on his classical background: a constant source of inspiration, along with the first world war, the flora and fauna of the west of Ireland, the Holocaust, love and friendship, and – obliquely – the conflict in Northern Ireland. His range was wide, and his approach distinctive. With his first collection, No Continuing City (1969), Longley showed himself to be a poet of exceptional poise and eloquence – but with a sardonic streak to temper his technical accomplishment.

What has been called a northern renaissance in literature was just getting under way at the time, and Longley, together with his friends and contemporaries Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, was there at the centre of it. These three in particular succeeded in revolutionising perceptions of Northern Irish poetry in the world at large, as well as fulfilling the role of guiding spirits to the slightly younger generation, including Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian.

For more than half a century, Longley was an exemplary practitioner of the art of poetry, and, in his later years, something of a “grand old man” of letters. He was a member of the Irish Association of Artists, Aosdána, and in 2010 was appointed CBE. In November 2021, a special room at Queen’s University Belfast was named the Longley Room in honour of the poet and his wife, Edna; and the Michael Longley scholarship fund was established, with two scholarships to be awarded annually to outstanding poetry students.

Longley was born in Belfast, “followed half an hour later by my twin, Peter” (as he put it in his 1994 autobiographical fragment Tuppenny Stung). The twins and their elder sister, Wendy, were the children of English parents who had settled in Northern Ireland, Maj Richard Longley and his wife, Constance (nee Longworth). Longley senior, a commercial traveller, first world war veteran and recipient of the Military Cross, is a recurrent and revered presence in his son’s poetry, beginning with the luminous In Memoriam – even if his attitude at the start fell short of encouragement. “Michael, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” he said when shown an early effort called Marigolds. Unfortunately the major did not live to witness his son’s triumphs in the literary world, with his honours and awards including the TS Eliot prize, the Whitbread poetry award, the Hawthornden prize, the International Griffin prize, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

After attending a local elementary school, Longley went on to the Belfast Royal Academical Institution and then to Trinity College Dublin, where he read classics but spent most of his time “inhaling” the poetry of others, and beginning to write his own. The story of his first encounter with Mahon in Trinity’s Front Square is well known. “Are you Longley? Can I borrow your typewriter?” demanded the unabashed newcomer. It was the prelude to a lasting friendship. When Longley married his fellow Trinity student, Edna Broderick, in 1964, Mahon was best man.

The following year, Longley returned to Belfast where Edna had secured a lectureship at Queen’s University, and there he remained for the rest of his life, though with frequent trips abroad, for poetry readings, conferences, or to collect awards. (On one occasion, when his shoes were stolen from the steps of a temple in Japan, his mortified hosts took Longley on a trawl of all the shoe shops in Tokyo, until, in the end, a pair was found to fit the size 12 feet of their guest.)

In the mid-1960s, Longley met Heaney, and another productive, but not frictionless, literary friendship began. “It was combative and no-holds-barred and in no sense an alliance,” Longley insisted in an interview in 1985, including Mahon in the count. He always disliked the idea of a fellowship of poets, preferring to attribute the outbreak of literary virtuosity in the north to “a coincidence of talent”. Nevertheless, the Heaney-Longley-Mahon conjunction marked a pivotal moment in cultural history.

After holding a couple of not very rewarding teaching posts, Longley joined the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1970. In his role as literature officer he was responsible for organising poetry-reading tours, arranging subsidies for new publishing houses such as Blackstaff Press, and generally promoting appreciation of the arts. He proved to be an adept arts administrator during his 21-year stint, aiming to “replace political belligerence with cultural pride”; but, eventually, worn down by bureaucracy, conflicts with advisory committees and endless red tape, he opted for early retirement.

Coincidentally – perhaps – the 12-year hiatus between The Echo Gate (1979) and Gorse Fires (1991) ended with the latter collection, just as Longley’s struggles with an increasingly arid administrative system were over. Questioned about the long silence, when the poems came sparingly, if at all, Longley replied: “If you’ve got nothing to say, say nothing.”

The true note was back with a vengeance in the nine full-length collections appearing between 1991 and 2022, all displaying an increasing mastery and depth of feeling (alongside a robust repudiation of what the poet labelled “mad dog shite”, in work or in life). Each new collection drew a round of applause for its continuing “subtlety, emotional power and rhythmic and musical resource”, among other virtues.

For his old friend and rival Heaney, Longley stood as “a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders”. Wit and playfulness enlivened Longley’s work whenever the poet’s mood was buoyant. “My one remaining ambition is to be / The last poet in Europe to find a rhyme,” he wrote in 1972, tongue-in-cheek; and for the rest of his life he practised the virtue of not taking himself too seriously.

Ash Keys: New Selected Poems was published in 2024 to coincide with his 85th birthday: frail but indomitable, and leaning on a stick, he took part in all the brouhaha surrounding the occasion, and continued to joke: “If I knew where the poems came from, I’d go there.” The phrase Where Poems Come From forms the title of a 2024 BBC film about Longley. Ash Keys includes his best, most characteristic and most enduring work, from the early, resonant In Memoriam to the beautiful Wild Orchids of 2020, with its litany of plants and placenames.

Longley’s final collection, The Slain Birds (2022), exemplifies his undying preoccupation with nature and natural forces, with botany and ornithology and animal life, from which a sense of the skull beneath the skin is not excluded: “the otter that drowned in an eel-trap”; “the ewes and spring lambs buried deep in the snow”. When his granddaughters in Scotland find a dead tawny owl, the small event engenders a couple of poems envisaging an afterlife for the bird: “Maisie sketches in charcoal its underside, / Amelia hugs to herself all the feathers …” And later in the same collection, the poet wonders:

… Where are the tree-pegs now
That held together my oblivion-boat
At the edge of the surf among sanderlings?
At spring tide where will my soul be going?

He is survived by Edna, their children, Rebecca, Daniel and Sarah, and seven grandchildren.

• Michael George Longley, born 27 July 1939; died 22 January 2025