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     In the bright chrome and marble-effect café of post-modernist criticism, where everything is a permissible object of scrutiny – from the texture of a dust-jacket to the plump contours of an ampersand – no apologies are needed for starting with the author photograph that adorns Michael Longley’s rich new book – his third since the breaking of a long poetic silence between The Echo Gate in 1979 and Gorse Fires in 1991 which was itself interrupted by two decades’ worth of collected poems in 1985. Longley, stern, beady-eyed and white-bearded, his face furrowed by the ploughshare of Life and Experience, looks out warily on potential readers. The poems in this collection support the jacket icon in their mood of elegy, brewed wisdom and acceptance.

     But Longley, only just turned 60 and in excellent form, is a premature Lear. True, there are plenty of elegies and graceful tributes here –  I counted no fewer than 18 poems either addressed to or sparked by named others – but there’s a zest and clear-eyed perceptiveness in these poems and an alert contemporaneity that show nothing like withdrawal. Derek Mahon once observed that “his natural length is the page, or half the page”. Make that a third. Longley has some marvellous miniatures here, delicate small epiphanies, invariably drawing in his botanical obsession, and closing with Yeats’s satisfying click. Short enough to quote in its entirety is ‘At Poll Salach’:

While I was looking for Easter snow on the hills
You showed me, like a concentration of violets
Or a fragment from some future unimagined sky,
A single spring gentian shivering at our feet.

Elsewhere, a sloe is a “smoky plum”, the trunk of a beech tree is “pewter”, a diamond of white on a pony’s muzzle in a stable at dusk is “a splash of birdlime”, and choughs wheeling above a cliff are “spreading their wingtips out like fingers”. Longley is a poet who notices such things and that particularity of observation is the best prophylactic against that abstract portentousness which can so easily spoil the elegiac motion.  There are several poems here about quilts and quilt-making and Longley’s concern for craft, for stitching together bright fragments into satisfying wholes, makes this an appealing metaphor. Classicism, remembrance of his father, domestic love, world wars, and the unobtrusively present shadow of northern Irish politics, are the other pieces of material plucked dextrously from the sewing basket.

     In ‘Remembering the Poets’, Longley acknowledges his youthful debts to the Latin poets including Propertius (“my soul mate”) – a poet better known to contemporary readers perhaps through the savage appropriations of Peter Reading – and Virgil: “our homespun internationalist, sighted/ At some government reception”. One of a pair of poems about “horses butchered on the battlefield” alludes to Homeric legend and their “best war memorial” being the weeping horses “still in mourning for Patroclus/ Their charioteer”. The clarity and stoic temper – rather than any over-clever allusiveness – is probably what Longley’s lucid art owes to his classical background. He is no Po-Mo games player and, unlike some I could mention in the north of Ireland, is never baffling or opaque. His refusal also of that slick knowingness that leaves its trail across so much of current verse helps him to remain open to experience, to the art of impassioned discovery that poetry should be, as a short poem, lightly titled ‘Fragment’ (again quoted entire) illustrates:

Forty years I’ve been at it, working hard,
A poetic pro, no longer the neophyte.
I’m standing near the metalworker’s yard
And can’t find the words for this starry night.

     This is a poetry from the north of Ireland, however, as all those dedications remind us. Reading poets from that region one can often feel like someone entering a crowded reception where everyone seems to know everyone else.  One hugs one’s champagne bumper to one’s chest, plucks an occasional black olive from a passing tray, and hopes that a familar face will show up. But some of those addressed inside these poems (apart from the italicised VIPs) may well be ploughmen not poets. Longley has a democratic, inclusive address and past students, country neighbours, and grand literati are enfolded in the same embrace. There is also the matter of vocabulary and even here, Longley is good enough to gloss words such as “hurly-gush” and “dayligone” and  “peerie-heedit” – the vernacular, defended so fiercely by poets like Tom Paulin, can sometimes be more impenetrable than the dialect of the mandarins. 

     But if all this makes Longley’s poetry seem a shade too cosy I’ve created the wrong impression. The late-lamented twentieth century and its well-advertised evils are here always just around the corner. Relaxing in a Tuscan villa, “with an old friend/ Between peach and pomegranate trees”, Longley connects his uncle, a veteran of the Italian campaign, with a bullet hole noticed in the kitchen beam. Uncle Matt opens fire: “leaving/ In the chestnut crossbeam a hole, a stray bullet/ That has taken half a century to find its mark”. Another beautiful short poem commemorates a day in 1996:

He would have been a hundred today, my father,
So I write to him in the trenches and describe
How he lifts with tongs from the brazier an ember
And in its glow reads my words and sets them aside.

     “A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders,” Longley has been called by Seamus Heaney (writing in familiar High Heaneyesque).  If poetry is about – for part of the time at any rate – celebration and commemoration – of the dead, of the living and their diurnal rituals, of the natural world and our relationship with it, then these dignified, illuminating, light-making, poems are the work of a poetic craftsman operating at full throttle, that poetic block long since banished, and that beady eye ever on the lookout for fresh connections.