Snow Poet
Michael Longley
Michael Longley: Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, £8.
Michael Longley: Broken Dishes. Belfast: Abbey Press, £5.
Michael Longley’s Selected Poems is more than welcome. His previous Selected Poems 1963-1980 was designed primarily to introduce the poet to American readers, and the absence of a Selected Poems readily available in Britain and Ireland at the same time was always to be regretted. But the nature of Longley’s poetic career has more recently made the need for such a volume an imperative. The unusually long gap between the 1979 The Echo Gate, and the fifth collection in 1991, Gorse Fires, may have made it difficult to appreciate fully the sustained coherence of Longley’s poetic career. And the enthusiasm with which Gorse Fires was, rightly, received, has tended to obscure both his achievement in the 1970s, and appreciation of the thematic and stylistic links between the earlier and later collections. The obvious virtue of the new Selected Poems is that it restores in one volume a full sense of that continuity. Gorse Fires and The Ghost Orchid were hailed as signalling a new energy and a new voice in Longley’s writing. It is, as the Selected Poems makes apparent, a “new” voice which draws its strength and themes from the “old” one.
Longley’s is a poetic voice which treads carefully, and which found itself slowly and unobtrusively in the early years of the Northern Ireland Troubles. He has been, on the whole, free from the “revisionitis” which has attacked some of his contemporaries: a few poems were tinkered with when they made their way from the original collections into Poems 1963-1983, but no changes have been made in the new Selected Poems and, where possible, many of the original, careful “pairings” of poems on pages have been retained. One might perhaps regret the absence of ‘The Rope-makers’, ‘Kindertotenlieder’, or ‘No Man’s Land’, but this is a generous and balanced selection from all Longley’s collections which makes apparent the extent to which his poetry works self-reflexively, building a confident voice from the foundations of the 1968 No Continuing City onwards. Many of the early poems feed into the later ones, set forth the themes and images with which Longley will be preoccupied throughout his career, and the Selected is selected to sustain those connections. Poems such as ‘Freeze-up’, where spring will “dust from our sills snow and feather”, or ‘Persephone’, where “footsteps borrow silence from the snow”, set the precedent for the dominating, highly complex feather and snow imagery of both Gorse Fires and The Ghost Orchid, and one of the strongest of his early poems, the elegy for his father, ‘In Memoriam’, establishes the father/son relationship destined to play such a prominent and wide-ranging role in all his subsequent collections:
Before you died,
Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarised
These words I write in memory. Let yours
And other heartbreaks play into my hands.
In his second collection, An Exploded View, that pre-Troubles invocation finds its answer in what is probably Longley’s best-known poem from the 1970s, and certainly one of the most powerful poems ever written about the Northern Ireland Troubles and the First World War, ‘Wounds’. His father is interred imaginatively alongside victims of the Troubles:
Now, with military honours of a kind,
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
[...]
Also a bus-conductor’s uniform –
He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers
Without a murmur, shot through the head
By a shivering boy who wandered in
Before they could turn the television down
Or tidy away the supper dishes.
To the children, to a bewildered wife,
I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.
Longley has always been able to touch on “taboo” subjects, to break the silences caused by historical and cultural confusion, or by human atrocity. The personal relationship with his father is pushed outwards in ‘Wounds’ to encompass the world wars and the Troubles. It is a relationship that has also translated into mythological terms, in the Odysseus/Laertes, Priam/Hector encounters in the later poetry, where the Trojan War parallels events in contemporary Northern Ireland. ‘Ceasefire’ is a poem much quoted in connection with the Northern Irish ceasefires, and one which, in the context of the Trojan War (and, by extension, Northern Ireland) carries as much a message of warning as it does one of redemption. At the end of the poem, Priam makes the extraordinary gesture of submission and atonement:
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’
Longley has always been recognised as a love poet, and as a poet who takes inspiration from the natural world. He is also a war poet, and it is not too extravagant to claim that he has written as intelligently, movingly, and consistently about the Northern Irish Troubles as have any of his contemporaries, probably more so. ‘The Ice-cream Man’, from Gorse Fires, is amongst the most powerful of those poems which mediate between private and public tragedy, as is the sequence ‘Wreaths’, from the earlier The Echo Gate:
When they massacred the ten linen workers
There fell on the road beside them spectacles,
Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:
Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine.Before I can bury my father once again
I must polish the spectacles, balance them
Upon his nose, fill his pockets with money
And into his dead mouth slip the set of teeth.
(‘The Linen Workers’)
In the later poems, the concern with suffering explored in relation to the First World War and sectarian killing in Ireland extends to encompass the Holocaust, a subject many poets fear to treat. The success of these poems lies in the use of a compassionate yet unsentimental voice, and an attention to detail which restores specificity at a point in history when it is most in danger of being lost in abstraction – numbers, dates, death-tolls counted beyond comprehension:
Because you will suffer soon and die, your choices
Are neither right nor wrong: a spoon will feed you,
A flannel keep you clean, a toothbrush bring you back
To your bathroom’s view of chimney-pots and gardens.
With so little time for inventory or leavetaking,
You are packing now for the rest of your life
Photographs, medicines, a change of underwear, a book,
A candlestick, a loaf, sardines, needle and thread.
(‘Ghetto’)
The measure of Longley’s success in perfecting his lyric voice may be that it has not provided critics with easy formulas for understanding or pigeonholing the poetry. Longley has always been less user-friendly for critics than either Heaney or Mahon. That may be, ironically enough, and despite the link Heaney senses between what he has described as “the political glamour of [Ulster], the sex-appeal of violence, and the prominence accorded to the poets”, because Longley’s is the voice of a poet who stayed and worked in Northern Ireland through the 1970s and 1980s. His touch is sure, but it is delicate, as in one of the later poems, ‘The Ghost Orchid’:
Added to its few remaining sites will be the stanza
I compose about leaves like flakes of skin, a colour
Dithering between pink and yellow, and then the root
That grows like a coral among shadows and leaf-litter.
Just touching the petals bruises them into darkness.
That delicacy has much to do with his felt responsibility towards, and response to, a home ground that has also been a war-zone, a responsibility lived as well as written. It is also an element of a style that has sometimes led to misrepresentation of Longley’s work: technique rather than temperament; style rather than subject. The extreme care with which these poems are written, a care not always exercised by others, is not so much indicative of formal restriction as of a cautious obliquity that finally resists reductive categorisation. Love poet, nature poet, or war poet? The question is unanswerable since Longley tends to work as all three simultaneously. Thus, ‘The Ghost Orchid’ hints obliquely at human as well as ecological disaster with its “leaves like flakes of skin”; the touch at the end is as erotic as it is painful, the gentle probing of an open wound, awareness of the fragility of that which survives disaster. Throughout his poems, Longley’s imaginative co-ordinates are plotted geographically north by north-west, from the war-torn city of Belfast to the redemptive rurality of Mayo, and historically from the Trojan War through the world wars to the Troubles. It is the gradual merging of all three categories – nature, love, war – into the individual poem, allied with a growing confidence in his lyric voice that makes Longley one of the foremost poets writing in Britain and Ireland today. This is a marvellous book, not to be missed.
******
Broken Dishes is a collection of fifteen poems, most of which are elegies for friends, artists, writers, or victims of war. Its frontispiece shows a photograph of an Amish quilt, ‘Broken Dishes’, from c.1930. The quilt serves as metaphor for the collection: the broken dishes are, in these poems, broken lives, but from those broken lives is created a delicate pattern that binds the poems together. Longley weaves colours and images – snow, feathers, frost-flowers, poppies – in and out of the poems, not so much as overt consolations but as elements of continuity between past and future, presence and absence, life and death. The first poem in the collection, ‘The Evening Star’, is a syntactical winding back home which seeks to reunite imaginatively that which has been divided:
The day we buried your two years and two months
So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you
I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower:
A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone,The evening star, the star in Sappho’s epigram
Which brings everything back that shiny daybreak
Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat
And brings the wean back home to her mammy.
Longley’s poems tend to work with, and to find their strength in, an awareness of their own inadequacy; he is never complacent about the function of elegies, perhaps because in Northern Ireland there have been too many to write, each one progressively more difficult than the last. As elegist, he does not look for universal truths and consolations, but works for an understanding of individual grief, and for an evocation of the idiosyncratic manifestations of personal grief seldom seen by the outside world. If at times this can leave the reader feeling a little abandoned on the outskirts of a private conversation, it is precisely that feeling of isolation from the subject of the poem that these elegies are all about. In the title poem, the isolation is also, in the end, a recognition of the inadequacy of language, an elegy for elegy:
Sydney our mutual friend is kneeling by your bed
Hour after hour on the carpetless hospital floor.
He repeats the same kind words and they become
An invocation to you and you start to die.You love your body. So does Sydney. So do I.
Communication is blankets and eiderdown and sheets.
All I can think of is a quilt called “Broken Dishes”
And spreading it out on the floor beneath his knees.
The abrupt, poignant truths which change nothing, the bumpy staccato sentences at the heart of the poem, are smoothed over by linguistic absence: blankets and eiderdown and sheets. “All I can think of”, the gesture, is all that remains.
Longley is the quintessential lyric poet, whose concerns are, and have always been, as he states himself, “Eros and Thanatos”. His elegies work in the dividing line between love and death; they also work to blur that line, to see two sides to the same coin. ‘Maureen Murphy’s Window’ looks back to MacNeice’s ‘Snow’, with “more than glass between the snow and the huge roses”, and, more subtly, to Keith Douglas’s ‘On a Return from Egypt’, where “The next month…is a window/ and with a crash I’ll split the glass./ Behind it stands one I must kiss,/ person of love or death”. In ‘Maureen Murphy’s Window’:
Because you’ve built shelves across the big window, keep-
Sakes and ornaments become part of the snowy garden.The footprints we and the animals leave in the snow
Borrow the blue from the blue glassware you collect.I imagine your dead husband moving in and out
Through windows and shelves without breaking a thing.
MacNeice’s glass, and Douglas’s window, are revisited here, as a line between life and death that is invisible, but is there to be crossed and recrossed imaginatively. Broken Dishes is, in many ways, even with its subtle intertextualities, an intensely private collection of poetry. It is also therefore the poet’s own self-imposed task in these poems to tiptoe in and out without breaking a thing. The snow is falling all over Longley’s poetry. And, like the subject of the poem, “He is the snow poet and he keeps his snow shoes on”.
Page(s) 18-24
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