The Stairwell

Description

In his 75th year, the tenth collection by the greatest living Northern Irish poet Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley's themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins- 'I have been thinking about the music for my funeral .' The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence - both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin's death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word 'stairwell' is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and 'homeland'. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry- to make them, somehow, the same thing.

Michael Longley has received many awards, among them the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines- Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he and his wife the critic Edna Longley live and work. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime's achievement.

It is...the warmth in Longley's writing that marks his poems out, makes them cherishable. Never forced, that affection is simply there. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * Longley's 10th collection weaves his classical themes of war, family and flaura and fauna into measured songs of commemoration for those he has loved. -- Paul McCartney * Sunday Times * A book of tiny, delicately lyrical commemorations and commendations. * Tablet * The Stairwell...is a stupendous collection of quiet beauty and universal significance. -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail * The book I have loved best, and have gone back to again and again. -- Adam Nicolson * Evening Standard *