20th-Century Irish Poems
2002
First Published
3.68
Average Rating
144
Number of Pages
This anthology results from decades of random reading plus a recent deliberate trawl to discover more examples of what Robert Graves calls 'heart-rending sense', poems I would want to copy out in longhand or learn by heart or share with others in a book like this one'. There is huge variety, in Michael Longley's selection, of tone, of versification and of music, but an unashamed leaning towards the lyric; some of the finest love poems and elegies in any language can be found here. History too makes its presence felt - emigration, the 1916 Uprising, World War, the Troubles, the hunger strikes - sometimes in close-up, sometimes as noises-off. What unites all the poems is the imaginative relationship they have, one way or another, with Ireland, and that they are written by poets 'who have been true to their experience, who have forged individual idioms, who have transformed one or other of our old languages from within'.
Avg Rating
3.68
Number of Ratings
22
5 STARS
27%
4 STARS
27%
3 STARS
32%
2 STARS
14%
1 STARS
0%
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Author
Michael Longley
Author · 13 books
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned his degree in Classics. He worked as a schoolteacher in Dublin, London, and Belfast before joining the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, where he served over twenty years as Director for Literature and the Traditional Arts. He is married to the critic Edna Longley and has three children. He has received numerous awards, including the American Irish Foundation Award, the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, the Whitbread Prize, and the Hawthornden Prize. He is also the recipient of the prestigious 2001 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
