Michael Longley - The Candlelight Master

 Michael Longley, The Candlelight Master (Cape)

The great flotilla of poets from Ireland that arrived in the Heaney generation is gradually being picked off by time. Since Heaney died we have also lost Ciaran Carson before Eavan Boland and Derek Mahon in 2020. These were major figures in a time that Ireland was outplaying the rest of the UK at poetry most of the time for some decades. Michael Longley turns 80 during The Candlelight Master, which was published last Autumn but I missed it, towards the end. He tells us that he's going to and then he does.

Although grouped together geographically they can of course be differentiated in several ways. For me, and many others I'm sure, Heaney's language or something about his rare music set him apart as quite possibly the finest poet in the language in his lifetime. Mahon had a rigour and sense that made him authoritative and admirable. If Longley's poems don't seem to lend themselves so readily to classroom lit crit, it might be because he has achieved a way of doing it that has gone beyond the standard noting of assonance, metaphor and the rest of the checklist regarded by some as the toolbox of proper poetry. But Michael Longley's poems stay in the memory as vividly as any of those of his contemporaries. Not only is he a reassuring presence with the equanimity that comes out of his poems but one imagines he does it without having to try too hard, that it's natural and there was no other way it could have been done.

The Candlelight Master is more of the same with poems about past friends and childhood, versions of Classical stories, war and, most definingly perhaps, his sense of place especially among the birds and plant life of his environment in Co. Mayo right over on the far side (as England would see it), above Galway. It seems significant that if you put Carrigskeewaun into Google it automatically suspects you are looking up Michael Longley.

The phrase that the book takes its title from is the four-line Poem in which he tells us he, the poet, is 'the candlelight master',

Striking a match in the shadows.

A smoky wick, then radiance. 

 

Many of the poems are short and encourage comparison with the economy of Chinese verse in which it might be possible to say a bit more in so few syllables but Longley does enough to suggest without feeling the need to set it all out for us.

In Empty Chariots, the 'irreplaceable charioteers',

            lay on the battlefield, far dearer

To the vultures than their wives.

 

That's a corrective to anyone who might have come away from the book thinking that he had grown too comfortable in old age enjoying birdsong, wild flowers and what has always appeared to be domestic bliss.

One might detect a theme or sub-text in a number of poems that there is a sure knowledge of things of value - in such things as the 'bird beak window' in St. Cross, Winchester, that has no birdsong, or the lack of nightingales in Ireland for which sedge warblers are compensation- that might be out of reach but Longley's equilibrium comes from the sure knowledge rather than the vain pursuit of them. For that way madness lies as other artists have discovered to their cost.

I was delighted to find that the 'currach' in the poem To Otomo Yakamochi is a small boat as I thought it might be, like a coracle, and it is a modest, benign attitude that understands, after discussing the riches of wildlife with the 1300 year old poet, that,

                    my soul's a currach

Disappearing behind the waves.

 

I wouldn't necssarily want to go too far with any of the ideas about 'poetry as therapy'. That's not how I think of it but I can see how time spent reading Michael Longley, which is not hard to do but benefits from some gentle contemplation, would serve the purpose. One does feel better for it.