From Ireland, poems of war, love and tenderness

WERE Michael Longley from any other country but Ireland, he’d be long considered a great poet. He’s fully formed and has a rich body of work, but almost no one has heard of him in America. With contemporaries like Heaney, and predecessors like Yeats and Synge, Irish who are merely major figures have trouble breaking into the international mind.

Longley has much to say about being Irish, especially about the Troubles, but he sees war as the common enemy to both sides. “I count among your better turns: / Play your guitar while Derry burns.” As a war poet he’s more likely to mix his father’s stories of being an Irishman fighting in World War I with classical myth than to speak of Catholics and Protestants. In “The Vision of Theoclymenus,” he writes, “What class of nightmare are you living through, / Poor bastards, your faces, knees shrouded in darkness, / The atmosphere electric with keening ... “ Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Longley is talking about Troy or Flanders Fields.

And he’s a true master of the sonnet. I can’t think of a living poet who writes such incredible sonnets. “Ceasefire” is a masterpiece; it ends with the couplet, “I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.” Unlike many sonnet writers, his are not all of one type or theme. In “Flight Feathers,” he writes: “The tide-digested burial mound has almost gone. / A peregrine is stooping high above my breastbone.” He travels with ease from the Iliad to his local fields.

Apart from his war poems, Longley’s verse is warm-hearted, loving and, to put it bluntly, sexy (whereas Heaney can be a bit cold). Some of his best pieces are hymns to the marriage bed or platonic love notes to friends. In “Light Behind the Rain,” he writes “From my belly or thigh / As love evaporates, / Lift with your fingernail / A flake of rice-paper.” This is not a poet who believes in the androgynous mind that Virginia Woolf and Coleridge said all writers needed. In Longley, the speaker is a man, the “you” is usually a woman, and she’s most often in his bed, as in “The Eel-Trap.”

I lie awake and my mind goes out to the otter

That might be drowning in the eel-trap:

your breathing

Falters as I follow you to the other lake

Below sleep, the brown trout sipping at the stars.

But he doesn’t write like some Irish Casanova. It’s more about being in love a long time with the same woman. Longley finds his greatest passions in everyday life, which he chronicles with deep tenderness.

They are eating. Food spicy with peace and friendship;

The child’s sleepy happiness soothing the cabin;

The lentils and the fish and the rose-pink radishes;

The mother’s breasts rising and falling as she breathes.

Lines like this satisfy completely.

Poems so content with life are rare, yet these seem to be where Longley is happiest. In “Baucis & Philemon,” when, to test to hospitality of mortals, the gods solicit a meal from an impoverished couple, they yell out, “Don’t kill the goose!” The poem positively yelps with practical concern, and it’s the small humble meal that shines, not the presence of the immortals. It’s hard to tell if he’s a poet of regular life who is good at stumbling upon depth, or a deep poet who knows that the quotidian is precious. And it’s not clear that it matters.

After John Berryman, American poetry turned toward having the weight and feeling of its words overshadow the story. Longley is strongly narrative. He makes the story as important as how it’s told, so he can sound a bit rambling to our ears. He’s not. Reading Longley is a good way to return to the story-poem.

The biggest problem reading Longley’s “Collected Poems” is that great poets are easier to chew in small pieces. Many of Longley’s books have been hard to find in the U.S. Thankfully, Yeats and Heaney entered the literary consciousness through slim volumes published over time -- it takes awhile to get used to the way the best poets jam vast operas into smallish spaces.

This offering is something of a giant tome, what poet Richard Howard calls a “tombstone” -- physically and mentally difficult to lug around, a book that requires a kind of stalwart battering to read.

But with this book, Longley appears finally to be getting through to people here. Better late than never, and better all at once than not at all.

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Laurel Maury writes reviews and articles for a variety of publications.