Michael Longley

Michael Longley was one of the poets whose new titles I routinely bought. They are diminishing in number. Last year the death of John Burnside reduced it to possibly the fingers on one hand and now it's one less than that.

Some comparison with Seamus Heaney is inevitable and if Longley's work doesn't quite compare with his, neither does anybody else's of that generation. It seems by all accounts he was an equally admirable person, though. I saw him do a reading at a conference in Oxford circa 2007 but, as I ought to be aware more often, was astute enough not to contrive any word with him. However, he was deeply impressive.

He was a major contributor to a special generation of Irish poets that, with Heaney, also included the great Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson and more and put Ireland at the forefront of poetry in the British Isles.

He was a poet of both time and place, the place being the affinity with home in Carrigskeewaun with his wife, Edna, the much respected scholar, and family and the time being both that that he lived in and longer C20th perspectives. Without being lured into modernist difficulties or intellectual elitism, his poetry could resonate by simply being honest, sincere and sympathetic.