Michael Longley, the last survivor of a remarkable triumvirate of Northern Irish poets that included Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, who was celebrated for the meditative beauty of his compact lyrics, many of which alluded to mythology and nature, died on Jan. 22 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was 85.
His wife, Edna Longley, said he died a hospital from complications following hip surgery.
Described by his friend Mr. Heaney as “a custodian of griefs and wonders,” and by President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland as “a peerless poet,” Mr. Longley had “a deep curiosity and a keen observational eye for the role of objects in our sensuous and imaginative lives,” John Paul Waters, an associate professor of English and Irish literature at New York University, said in an interview. (Mr. Longley’s appearance at N.Y.U. in May 2024, at Mr. Waters’s behest, was his final reading in the U.S.)
“He wrote about the Troubles,” Mr. Waters continued, invoking the term used to characterize the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. “But his passion was for writing about the natural world.”
The classical tradition, specifically in Greek and Latin literature, was a key feature of Mr. Longley’s poetry. As he said in a speech in 2022, “Homer has haunted me for more than 60 years.”
This was clearly a useful way of being possessed. It was the lens through which Mr. Longley examined the Northern Irish situation.
He “had an uncanny ability to allow myths that might have seemed less than pertinent to be tellingly on point, particularly in his many repurposings of Homer,” the poet Paul Muldoon wrote in the foreword to Mr. Longley’s 2024 poetry collection, “Ash Keys.”
One such repurposing was Mr. Longley’s most famous poem, “Ceasefire,” written in 1994 and published in The Irish Times soon after the Provisional I.R.A. cease-fire. It compares a profoundly emotional scene from the “Iliad” — Troy’s King Priam pleading with his son Hector’s killer, the Greek warrior Achilles, for the return of Hector’s body — to the reconciliation of enemies during the Northern Ireland peace talks. It begins:
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
“It’s a public poem,” Mr. Muldoon said in an interview. “It’s the kind of poem that Longley, like most people writing lyrically, wouldn’t have necessarily been planning to write early in his career. In many ways, he would have been more comfortable writing about the birds, beasts and flowers. But it’s very hard to be from that part of the world and not be a public poet.”
Mr. Longley included flowers in another public poem about the Troubles, “The Ice-Cream Man.” It begins with these lines:
Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
His subjects were consequential — love, nature and the nature of man — but Mr. Longley’s poems could have hardly been less Homeric in length. “Ceasefire,” for example, unspools in 14 trim lines: three quatrains and a couplet.
“Michael was a miniaturist,” Mr. Muldoon said of his longtime friend. “He was interested in being concise, and a number of his poems are not much more than four lines. He may have been slightly out of the mainstream in that regard. But that was his ideal: the little poem. Something like scrimshaw — the brief, imagistic poem.”
Michael George Longley was born on July 27, 1939, in Belfast, where he also grew up. He had an older sister, Wendy, and a twin brother, Peter (whose death, a decade ago, inspired the second half of Mr. Longley’s 2014 collection, “The Stairwell”). His father, Richard Longley, was a furniture salesman; his mother, Constance (Longworth) Longley, ran the household.
Mr. Longley studied classics at Trinity College Dublin, but didn’t graduate. (He received an honorary degree in 1999.) “Perhaps I had the vaguest notion of sleepwalking into teaching or the civil service. But I was bitten by the poetry bug,” he told The Guardian in 2004. “The first poetry I wrote as an undergraduate was splurges of emotion. But I remember taking one of these splurges and trying to make it into two sonnets.”
He added, “That kind of challenge was addictive.”
After leaving school, Mr. Longley taught in Dublin, London and then Belfast, where he became part of the Belfast Group, a loose confederation of poets that included Mr. Heaney (who died in 2013) and Mr. Mahon (who died in 2020).
His first collection, “Ten Poems,” a pamphlet, was released in 1965. The more capacious collection “No Continuing City” came out in 1969. A dozen more volumes followed, some written during his long tenure on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
In addition to his wife, a literary critic and social commentator, Mr. Longley is survived by his children, Rebecca Murray, Daniel Longley and Sarah Longley; and seven grandchildren.
He was the recipient of nearly all the awards available to a poet — among them, the 1991 Whitbread Poetry Prize (for his collection “Gorse Fires), the 2001 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the 2017 English PEN Pinter Prize.
In 2022, Mr. Longley won the Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize, which is awarded every five years and comes with a grant of 250,000 euros. In his acceptance speech, he quoted the work of Vasyl Stus, one of Ukraine’s most heralded and defiant poets during Soviet rule: “There is a fight; I’m on the battlefield/Where all my soldiers are the words I wield.”
He also invoked the suffering of Russian poets like Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova at the hands of Joseph Stalin.
“Around the world, they imprison journalists and intellectuals, writers and poets,” Mr. Longley said. “Tyrants fear the word.”
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