One of the pleasures of this book is the way it gives us more of what Longley has been giving for so long: more orchids and otters, splinter-moments of Homeric epic, addresses to fellow artists, old friends and family members. For readers familiar with his work, any of Longley\u2019s books, almost, indeed, any of his poems, will seem to reach out into many others. He\u2019s a poet of individually mostly short, sometimes tiny pieces, but the way one leads into another gives his writing a paradoxical amplitude and reach. And however much he revisits the same preoccupations, he\u2019s never simply recycling himself \u2013 his eye and feelings remain fresh, making us see the familiar from new angles.<\/p>\n
This involves a refocusing of his imagination. He does still deal with violence, but it\u2019s not at the centre of his attention in the way it was during the Northern Irish troubles. Good as they are, the poems in The Candlelight Master<\/em> based on the Iliad<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em> aren\u2019t as haunting as the best Homeric poems in Gorse Fires<\/em> and The Ghost Orchid<\/em>. There\u2019s been a shift in his writing about the non-human world, too. Its violence is occasionally seen but only in a very muted way; there\u2019s nothing as electrifying as the last lines of \u2018Pale Butterwort\u2019 in The Weather in Japan<\/em>, with their unforgettably aghast glimpse into nature\u2019s ruthlessness and terror. However, the refocusing has brought an ever-finer touch in other ways. \u2018Dandelions\u2019, in a group of poems recalling the \u2018Ghetto\u2019 sequence in Gorse Fires<\/em>, seems to me one of the absolute high points in Longley\u2019s writing. It combines immense clarity with almost infinite delicacy and depth because of the way every line and phrase is alive with multiple implications, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes pulling against each other. Only its positioning within the group and our memory of the \u2018Ghetto\u2019 sequence relates it to the camps at all. Saying that \u201cthe children\u201d \u2013 by implication the children of the camps \u2013 \u201ccan still be heard\u201d but that their memories are growing fainter and fainter, the poet adjures us to<\/p>\n Listen. Listen. The fineness of his touch appears in the way the poem trembles between the moral imperative to remember (\u201cListen. Listen\u201d) and a sense that forgetting reflects the healing process of time. It appears too in the remarkable contrast between the natures of the two italicized passages. The first is a tiny snatch of dialogue whose urgent speech cadences invite the reader to picture and hear<\/em> children with their heads together, one telling another how to resist the horror around them. The second, answering at a tangent, soars into pure lyricism that sounds like an enigmatic fragment of medieval Irish nature poetry. It\u2019s a transformative moment in a poem whose every word resonates in the imagination and invites meditation.<\/p>\n Meditation, not interpretation. T S Eliot wrote that Henry James had \u201ca mind too fine to be violated by an idea.\u201d There are plenty of ideas in Longley but in the volumes since Gorse Fires<\/em> his writing has become so refined, its ideas so subtly, sinuously and complicatedly alive in their own words and the silences between them that it seems almost impossible to say anything meaningful about them without quoting the whole poem they occur in. Even then, pointing and paraphrase feel like a violation. This, I think, is the direction in which Longley\u2019s poetry has improved with age even as it\u2019s ceded certain kinds of muscular power.<\/p>\n \u201cListen. Listen\u201d, and \u201clook\u201d. Longley\u2019s poetry, especially his later work, gets its beauty and distilled greatness from the sensitivity of his attention to the world around him. \u2018The Anthologist\u2019, a short piece about the eighth century Japanese poet and anthologist Otomo Yakamochi, focuses on Yakamochi\u2019s listening, telling us that he listened to thousands of poems as he listened to birdcalls, insects, frogs and girls singing at work. The longer \u2018To Otomo Yakamochi\u2019 addresses him directly on the occasion of Longley\u2019s receiving the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. It illustrates many of Longley\u2019s qualities, including the quiet but total confidence of his address:<\/p>\n You, Otomo Yakamochi, Within the radiant simplicity of that last line I feel Longley\u2019s sophisticated amusement at the thought that some of his readers will take it as a swerve into bathos and his own absolute conviction that it\u2019s anything but \u2013 that his and Yakamochi\u2019s love of birds and flowers reflects a profound connection with the life of the universe. The next stanza repeats a gesture Longley often makes \u2013 \u201cgiving\u201d someone something by declaring in a poem that he\u2019s doing so. He \u201cgives\u201d Yakamochi European birds and flowers. This lovely little fiction of generosity between poets of different continents and millennia reflect s the vast idea, fundamental to Longley as to T S Eliot or to the Greek Seferis, that all real artists, whether grand or humble, are involved in the same enterprise, drawing nourishment from and giving it to each other\u2019s work. Obliquely and incidentally it\u2019s a courteous reciprocation of the twenty-first century Japanese medal-awarders\u2019 gift. The pretence of talking to Yakamochi himself brings conversational lightness to the large and (given Longley\u2019s age) poignant thought that follows, \u201cWe gaze on our soul-landscapes \/ More intensely with every year\u201d. Then the fifth stanza restates a fundamental part of Longley\u2019s own aesthetic, something it has in common with Japanese haiku poets, and the Chinese poets he linked with in The Ghost Orchid<\/em> \u2013<\/p>\n Anything however small Setting the snail against the mountains reminds us of Issa\u2019s famous haiku about the snail climbing Mount Fuji. Longley goes on to imagine Yakamochi galloping along the White Strand, near Longley\u2019s cottage in Carrigskeewaun. Echoing \u2018Water-burn\u2019, from The Weather in Japan<\/em>, this adds to the sense of connections reaching across space and time, connections that give a movingly paradoxical twist to the last stanza:<\/p>\n A small townland becomes my life, This stanza in turn echoes \u2018Out There\u2019 in The Ghost Orchid<\/em>, which closes \u201cI should have spent my life \/ Listening to the waves.\u201d I\u2019m sure that Longley deliberately meant to gather these old lines into the new poem\u2019s field of meaning. Remembering them deepens the sense of approaching finality now. There\u2019s a critical point to be made too, though. Lovely as the earlier poem is, I do feel that comparison of the two shows how much the later Longley has developed in his ability to give depth to the most deceptively simple words, to create an effortlessly rich shimmering of feelings around them.<\/p>\n Sensitive receptiveness is key to most of these poems, whether about flowers, artists, family or even all three at once, like \u2018Fen Violet\u2019, which addresses Longley\u2019s daughter with the beautiful line, \u201cYou paint flowers, Sarah, as though they have souls\u201d. His genius is to have perfected an art of celebration and acceptance. Two death-camp poems that don\u2019t have this element seem to me essentially flat, carrying a hard punch on first reading but with nowhere to go after that. The contrast isn\u2019t a simple one between positive and negative poems, though. The poems of celebration work so well partly because they\u2019re not merely celebratory. There\u2019s almost always a leavening touch of astringency, irony or humour, or more simply an awareness of different ways of seeing the same situation. Take \u201canything, however small \/ May<\/em> make a poem\u201d. \u201cCan<\/em> make a poem\u201d would be soft-centred. \u201cMay\u201d, heavily stressed at the start of the line, qualifies the encouraging claim by its implicit reminder that success in making a real poem also depends on work and inspiration. The beautiful \u2018Matisse\u2019 too gets its depth and humanity from the way celebration of genius is leavened by other perspectives. The aging, crippled painter is shown in his pomp in his wheelchair, making his cut-outs with costly materials and the help of beautiful assistants. Recreating the world, he\u2019s like a king or even god (Longley uses the word \u2018genesis\u2019 to describe his creation) but there\u2019s both humour and the poignancy of accepted loss in the final picture of the artist in his studio,<\/p>\n Memory replacing the outside world <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Candlelight Master<\/em> by Michael Longley. Jonathan Cape.80pp.; \u00a310.00<\/p>\n I would like to thank Patricia Oxley for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 99.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the pleasures of this book is the way it gives us more of what Longley has been giving for so long: more orchids and otters, splinter-moments of Homeric epic, addresses to fellow artists, old friends and family members. For readers familiar with his work, any of Longley\u2019s books, almost, indeed, any of his […]<\/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-2463","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\/2463"}],"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=2463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2465,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions\/2465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nJust look up to heaven
\nAnd think about the violets<\/em>
\nOne whispers, and another
\nThe dandelions call to me
\nAnd the white chestnut branches.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nPoet and governor, and I
\nMinor bureaucrat, and poet too,
\nMeet across thirteen hundred years
\nTo talk about birds and flowers.<\/p>\n
\nMay make a poem, a snail, say,
\nTucked into the marram grass,
\nIn the distance Tateyama
\nOr Mweelrea, holy mountains.<\/p>\n
\nCarrigskeewaun, grandchildren
\nWading in the tidal channel \u2013
\nOtomo, my soul\u2019s a currach
\nDisappearing behind the waves.<\/p>\n
\nAnd his imagination a lagoon
\nWhere, immobile, he swam every day
\nContemplating his submarine kingdom.<\/p>\n