Wake Forest University Press

2004   64 pages
paperback

"Whatever Longley attends to — whether war poetry revivified, the minutiae of the landscape he lives in, its flora and ornithology, or Homeric retellings — he describes with the same honoring accuracy. As for much of Irish poetry, the political is always part of the evocation. … [T]he poems are sometimes bird's-eye views of the garden or the 'fallen branches' upon which the birds come to rest. The suggestion of sturdiness and growth, rootedness and flourish, provides a fitting metaphor for these verses, which reveal a poet both prolific and wise, a heartening combination." Meg Tyler, Harvard Review

2000   80 pages
clothbound

Winner of the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, 2001
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, 2001
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, 2000

"Michael Longley's The Weather in Japan is the best book I have read this year and, although I have admired him for some time, I did not expect him to surpass himself.... Brilliant, and taking me back to earlier brilliance, [it] shocked me into understanding that the poet I had admired had quietly become — along with Seamus Heaney, say, and Geoffrey Hill — a contemporary who should endure over the life of our language." Donald Hall, Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

2000   80 pages
paperback

Winner of the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, 2001
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, 2001
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, 2000

"Michael Longley's The Weather in Japan is the best book I have read this year and, although I have admired him for some time, I did not expect him to surpass himself.... Brilliant, and taking me back to earlier brilliance, [it] shocked me into understanding that the poet I had admired had quietly become — along with Seamus Heaney, say, and Geoffrey Hill — a contemporary who should endure over the life of our language." Donald Hall, Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

1999   132 pages
clothbound

This is Michael Longley’s own selection from thirty years of writing. It reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work, which has been celebrated– in Britain and Ireland but also in the U.S. – for its lyric intensity, metaphysical wit, and thematic and formal range. Poet and critic Sean O’Brien writes, “His work indicates one of the gifts of the major poet, of making the one life speak for all, and its corollary, of seeming to be able to speak to anyone.”

1999   132 pages
paperback

“Longley has all the necessary gifts – precision, the celebrant’s tongue, and that touch of mystery that sets certain poets apart.” George Mackey Brown

“His measured rhythms, skilfully crafted metaphors and elaborate syntax always insist on poetry’s origins in ceremony, its powers to commemorate and dignify.” Mark Ford

1996   62 pages
paperback

"It is a volume in which the preoccupations of a poetic lifetime are richly deepened, intensified and supplemented in poems of lucid, ceremonious courtesy and goodwill: a 'flowering' itself, in more than one sense." Neil Corcoran, Times Literary Supplement

"Longley's wittiest book to date.… The Ghost Orchid is as distinguished and memorable a collection as any published in our times." David Wheatley, Irish Review

1987   206 pages
paperback
First edition

"An intrepid Irish poet.... To read these forty-three undated poems is to admire the virtual absence of solecism.  To realize that they were conceived and shaped over a period of seventeen years is to appreciate the struggle which must have accompanied and determined the lyric force and the fearless compassion that together define Longley's poetic profile." Vernon Young, Parnassus

1998   57 pages
clothbound

"… one of the most impressive poetic sequences to emerge from Ireland in recent years …. An extraordinary performance." Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

1998   57 pages
paperback

"There is a quality of intellect in this recent work — its varied influences, verbal play and thematic design — that beggars the work of many other writers. The Yellow Book is Mahon's Autumn Journal, much like MacNeice in its congenial (sometimes jaundiced or wistful) meditations." The Hudson Review

1996  64 pages
clothbound

"… something fresh and virtually unprecedented in modern Irish poetry: a work of art that is at once a love letter and a dream of reconciliation, a diary of a trauma and a vision of restoration." Ben Howard, Sewanee Review

"From the first page of Derek Mahon's new collection of poems we know that we are back in the hands of a master." Peggy O'Brien, Irish Times