{"id":1881,"date":"2017-09-02T08:33:41","date_gmt":"2017-09-02T08:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1881"},"modified":"2017-09-02T19:06:43","modified_gmt":"2017-09-02T19:06:43","slug":"review-michael-longleys-angel-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1881","title":{"rendered":"Review – Michael Longley’s Angel Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Longley, Angel Hill<\/em>, 80 pp, \u00a310.00, Jonathan Cape, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Rd, London SW1V 2SA<\/p>\n

From the first words of Angel Hill<\/em> you know you\u2019re in the hands of a master. Joyfully rehearsing old themes and landscapes, Longley brings an ever-finer touch to their expression. The opening poem, addressed to Fleur Adcock, is typical: yet another celebration of an old friendship, yet another celebration of an artist, yet another poem about wild flowers and birds, it\u2019s also completely fresh and alive in itself. Like all these poems, it\u2019s humane and profoundly civilised, remarkable for its ability to hold in balance the intimacy with which it addresses an individual person and the wide imaginative spaces it steps into. Moving with ease from the bookish world of well-appointed desks to the wild world out of doors, Longley suddenly bathes both in Ovidian flower myth in a way I find breathtaking:<\/p>\n

You gave me a gilded magnifying glass
\nFor scrutinising the hearts of wild flowers.<\/p>\n

Such combining of multiple perspectives within brief, superficially occasional poems reflects the depth of emotional commitment that lies behind Longley\u2019s constant revisiting of recurrent themes.<\/p>\n

Another lovely poem to a writer is \u201cInglenook\u201d, inviting Edna O\u2019Brien to join him in his holiday cottage in Carrigskeewaun. Imagining how a bitch otter might lope from the waves, Longley pictures \u201cHer whiskers glittering with sea water\u201d. The line leaps off the page for its evocativeness and beauty of sound. In this poem, though, even the plainest words are suffused with a tenderness that directs itself simultaneously at O\u2019Brien and the surrounding world. In fact some of the plainer lines are richer in implication than this vividly outstanding one, though in the delicate economy of the poem it\u2019s the presence of the striking line that animates the quieter ones. The invitation to O\u2019Brien to<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Take my hand,
\nBalance on slippery stepping-stones<\/p>\n

swarms with unspoken feelings, as we picture the awkwardness and frailty of these two elderly writers. A combination of limpid utterance with formal balance creates a stillness around the words within which unspoken meanings flower. Often these involve echoes of other poems by Longley himself, and it\u2019s easy to feel that all his poems form a continuum of interplaying forces, a vast, complicated, pin drop sensitive chamber of echoes enormously extending the imaginative reach of whatever individual poem sets those echoes in motion.<\/p>\n

As fundamental to Longley\u2019s achievement as the skill of his writing is the tenderness with which his poetry looks on the world. He opens our hearts and eyes by opening his own. What results is the reverse of an outpouring of subjective emotion; it\u2019s a sensitive receptiveness to what\u2019s out there<\/em>, given balance and perspective by a continual current of genial humour. He can be remarkably candid and unembarrassed, as in the moving \u201cRoom to Rhyme\u201d, in memory of Seamus Heaney. His candour is the opposite of confessional, though, and much the better for being so.\u00a0 It\u2019s in the nature of confessional poetry to be essentially self-regarding. Longley\u2019s is anything but. It\u2019s also in the nature of confessional poetry to have an ambiguous and in my view often squalid or dishonest relation to shame. Longley\u2019s poetry strikingly combines candour and intimacy with reticence, the two complementing each other in a way that demands immense poetic skill. For example, throughout Longley\u2019s life he\u2019s written love poems to his wife Edna, some of them highly erotic. Those poems must form a background to his remarking, at the beginning and end of the poem to O\u2019Brien, that she called herself \u201cthe other Edna\u201d. We know nothing about the private implications of the joke, but reference to it creates a flow of intimate feeling between the poet and the novelist, a hinterland of shared life that we feel as a warming presence in the poem, one that seems to include us even as it touches on things that are none of our business.<\/p>\n

These poems aren\u2019t uniformly good. A few that sparked real pleasure on first reading fell flat when I returned to them, whether because I was in a less receptive mood or because they were too dependent on a single impact. \u201cMenu\u201d and \u201cPlace-Names\u201d struck me as doodles. And yet the slightest occasion can become magical in Longley\u2019s hands, like the enchanting \u201cDream\u201d:<\/p>\n

I dream I am swimming
\nWith a horse, tail and mane
\nSeaweedy, fetlocks
\nBlossoming in the depths.<\/p>\n

Most of these poems gave me pleasure that deepened with each rereading; a few gave me something approaching awe. I think this book is even stronger than Longley\u2019s last two, good as those were.<\/p>\n

I wrote this review before my June entry on Angel Hill<\/em>. Some of the ideas in the review are developed further in that entry, which you can read by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to post the review, which appeared in The North 58.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Longley, Angel Hill, 80 pp, \u00a310.00, Jonathan Cape, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Rd, London SW1V 2SA From the first words of Angel Hill you know you\u2019re in the hands of a master. Joyfully rehearsing old themes and landscapes, Longley brings an ever-finer touch to their expression. The opening poem, addressed to Fleur Adcock, is typical: […]<\/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-1881","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\/1881"}],"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=1881"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1884,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881\/revisions\/1884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}