The Weather In Japan

Description

Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, the T.S. Eliot prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize; The Weather in Japan is a superb collection from one of our greatest living poets. In the space of two collections, Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995), Michael Longley broke a long poetic slience and re-drew the map of poetry at the end of the millenium. The Weather in Japan consolidates and expands the vision of those volumes, leading the reader through the various hells we have made this century. Preferring to see the horrors of political violence through the filter of the domestic, pointing up the fragility of the order we create, he takes us from the fields of Flanders, through Terezin and Auschwitz to the troubled north of Ireland. And, in images drawn from the west of Ireland, Italy, America and Japan, he explores the fundamentals of 'home' and 'civilisation'. Longley's grave humanity, Zen-like connective imagination and ecological eye give the most delicate compelx, beautiful things - a spring gentian, a lapwing or a snowflake - the nutritious light that allows them to grow greater than the crass brutality that surrounds them.

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College Dublin where he read Classics. He has published ten collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006. In 2001 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was awarded a CBE in 2010. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2007-2010. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.

A keeper of the aristic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders -- Seamus Heaney One of the finest lyric poets of our century -- John Burnside 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 -- Sean O'Brien Michael Longley's affectionate metre, his clean-cut and lucid measure, is one of the most distinguished accomplishments in contemporary poetry -- Douglas Dunn While much contemporary verse attempts to sound casual, even offhand, Longley has consistently explored ways of thickening the texture of his idiom. His measured rhythms, skillfully crafted metaphors and elaborate syntax always insist on poetry's origins in ceremony, its powers to commemorate and dignify... His poetry binds the actual and mythical so seamlessly one looks in vain for the joints -- Mark Ford