The Stairwell, the first poem in Michael Longley's new collection, reminds me of Heaney's Personal Helicon. Where the Heaney poem was an early, 'manifesto' poem in which he investigated wells, and
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Longley's is a retrospective poem about sound in which he is taken out into a stairwell,
to demonstrate
In the Hallowe'en-decorated lobby the perfect acoustic
but they both resonate, use a similar metaphor and meditate on sound, language and meaning.
Longley is by no means the heir to Heaney's pre-eminent position. There isn't going to be a true inheritor of that. This book does, however, have Longley in wonderful form, contemplating his brother's recent death, memories of his father, and is always rooted in home, family and his local natural world of birdsong and small animals. The poetry is disarmingly uncomplicated but repays closer looking. They grow in stature as their reflective music becomes more noticeable and, in fact, the more linguistically ambitious are perhaps the most successful.
Amelia's Poem is one sentence strtched over 14 lines with a rhyme scheme you might find if you look hard enough.
Amelia, your newborn name
Combines with the midwife's word
And, like smoke from driftwood fires,
Wafts over the lochside road
Past the wattle byre
and so on as Amelia mingles with the world, becoming part of it undramatically and understatedly but memorably.
In The Apparition, Longley has himself and his brother as Achilles and Patroclus in one of several Homeric themes here, and not for the first time,
'Even n the House of Death, something remains,
A ghost or image, but there's no real life in it.
'Like smoke, the hallucination slipped away' but there is a presence as well as an absence.
But Longley began by considering his own death before the poems about his father and brother come in the two sections of the book and so it is unexpected the way in which such a feeling of life comes out of the poems as a set. Although there is much reference to war- including notably a parallel with Helen Thomas helping Ivor Gurney 'when he was miles away from Gloucestershire/ And sanity', it is wood, birds and things gently celebrated as alive that leave the most lasting impression.
Longley's stairwell is a personal one, echoing yet but, as in words he uses himself, 'with a perfect acoustic'.
