{"id":1601,"date":"2015-03-08T10:34:57","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T10:34:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2015-03-08T10:34:57","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T10:34:57","slug":"michael-longley-the-stairwell-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1601","title":{"rendered":"Michael Longley, The Stairwell – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

My feeling is that overall the imaginative pressure of The Stairwell<\/em> isn\u2019t quite as high as that of earlier books by Longley, including his last, A Hundred Doors<\/em>. It\u2019s still a remarkable collection that rewards close and repeated attention. The poems grow in the mind both by their own internal resonances and by the way they resonate with the rest of Longley\u2019s work. Immaculate timing and perfect attunement of language make the best of them extraordinarily sensitive registers and transmitters of imaginative experience. Take the start of \u201cAshes\u201d:<\/p>\n

The first creature I meet when I arrive
\nIs a stoat slipping underneath the gate,
\ndominating the garden\u2019s quietude<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t concisely define why that works so well. It\u2019s above all to do with a subtle interplay between sound and meaning. What\u2019s easy to see, though, is how the contrast between the furtiveness of \u201cslipping\u201d and the assertiveness of \u201cdominating\u201d, emphasised by aural and grammatical rhyming, heightens the impact of the stoat\u2019s domination, filling the garden\u2019s quiet with secret fear. The implied viewpoint trembles between those of the human visitor, the stoat and the stoat\u2019s unseen potential prey. We\u2019re made to feel how relative power is. The stoat is as wary of man as a rabbit is of the stoat. At the same time, the use of \u201cmeet\u201d rather than \u201csee\u201d puts the stoat and the man on equal terms, and this is profoundly true to Longley\u2019s vision, a reverence for non-human life that forms an affinity between him and Merwin. The rest of the poem is as good, as alive to other lives, as mobile in tone and feeling, as sensitive to the relations of meaning and sound, as these lines are.<\/p>\n

Other poems are equally strong and show Longley extending his range even as he revisits old themes. \u201cNight Walk\u201d and \u201cHomeland\u201d, both \u201cafter Mikhail Lermontov\u201d, work appropriative and transformative magic by the brilliance of their auditory imagination and by substituting Irish and personally numinous images for Lermontov\u2019s Russian ones (I can only read the originals in translation, so I don\u2019t mean any disparagement of Lermontov by saying that). In new poems on his father\u2019s experiences in the First World War, Longley seems to realise with fresh sharpness just how young his father was then. There are fine Homeric poems, each of which takes Longley\u2019s adaptations of Homer in original tonal and stylistic directions. \u201cCrickets\u201d, a version of Homer\u2019s simile comparing old men to crickets, is reminiscent of Merwin in its almost complete lack of punctuation. Its tone undulates between humour, hints of awe at the natural world\u2019s mysterious depths, and a kind of airy lightness. In sharp contrast, in the sonnet \u201cFace\u201d, the octave is an elegant but shockingly violent rewording of Homer\u2019s description of a soldier speared in the face. The sestet compares this soldier to a Tommy with his face blown away. It\u2019s the quiet last line that packs the heaviest punch though. Asking \u201cWhat can surviving hands reach up \/ To touch? Tongue-stump? Soul-meat?\u201d Longley answers, \u201cHomer\u2019s ghost has nothing to say\u201d. From a poet who reveres Homer as Longley does, that\u2019s devastating. Its ripples collide with those of all his other Homeric poems, his poems on the value of poetry and art, and his poems about death.<\/p>\n

The book ends with a series of poignant meditations on the death of Longley\u2019s twin brother, Peter. Death is everywhere, as it always has been in Longley\u2019s work, but everywhere it heightens the sense of the value of life.<\/p>\n

I’d like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to post this review, which appeared in The North no. 53.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My feeling is that overall the imaginative pressure of The Stairwell isn\u2019t quite as high as that of earlier books by Longley, including his last, A Hundred Doors. It\u2019s still a remarkable collection that rewards close and repeated attention. The poems grow in the mind both by their own internal resonances and by the way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-michael-longley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1603,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/1603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}