Letters
Dear Editors,
Hobsbaum on Langley in Thumbscrew 3 could pass for Salieri on Mozart: “Any list of contemporary Irish poets is sure to include Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Most probably ... Derek Mahon ... Somewhere along the line, however, the name of Michael Longley will occur.” The rhetorical implication is that it will occur near the names of Jem Casey and Dusty Rhodes. But Heaney, Muldoon and Longley shout ‘Anseo’ together.
Hobsbaum passes over Longley’s first poetic phase like a blight, observing of The Echo Gate: “True, rhyme had been largely abandoned...” A detectable concessionary tone may be traced to your reviewer’s piece in a recent Honest Ulsterman where Hobsbaum betrayed his astonishing ignorance of Longley’s formal development in that volume. Faint praise is choked out for a page or so until an apparent opportunity presents itself to bury Longley under another Ulster poet’s achievement: “Even Longley’s lifelong friend Derek Mahon is in reality a very different poet”. Eh? If Langley’s lifelong friends are poets like him, well then, vive la difference. Particularly astute is Hobsbaum’s suggestion that Longley sacrificed experience by staying true to Ulster, working the lip of that crucible of nations, when he could have been, er, watching the vegetables of a few universities like Hobsbaum. Clearly this is true. Only academics know life. Excuse me: I must now go and saw a metre off my nose.
Twice Hobsbaum drags in Langley’s wife. The first time I was grateful his pets and children were being spared. Second time I remembered Professor Longley’s introduction to her book of essays, The Living Stream, which put Hobsbaum’s much-vaunted Belfast ‘Group’ in its real context. The ungenerous thought occurs that Hobsbaum’s mythered. Of Famous Seamus, Hobsbaum declares he “seems effortlessly to outclass everyone”. He does not mention that Heaney delegated Langley to be a custodian of griefs and wonders. Heaney’s description of the achievement of Longley’s work effortlessly outclasses your review.
Yours,
Ian Duhig,
Leeds.
Page(s) 43-44
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