Selected Poems

Description

In the decades since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's reputation as a poet - and amongst poets - has grown steadily, and there are now several generations of readers in Great Britain and beyond for whom he is one of the essential poets of the twentieth century. To readers and critics alike, the nature of MacNeice's poetic work as a whole is a matter of importance, and the new Collected Poems, entirely re-edited by Peter McDonald, prints the poetry in groupings corresponding closely to the individual volumes published by Faber between 1935 and 1963. The texts of the poems are based on a comparison of all printed versions, as revised in the light of the poet's later thoughts. This has resulted in a large number of changes, presenting MacNeice's poetry more accurately, as well as more fully, than all previous collections. The new Collected Poems includes, as appendices, The Last Ditch - the short book of poems which MacNeice published with the Cuala Press in 1940 - and The Revenant, a cycle of songs written for MacNeice's wife, the singer Hedli Anderson.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, later a bishop. He was educated in England at Sherborne, Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. His first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, appeared in 1929, and he subsequently worked as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963. Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. He has published nine collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won both the Hawthornden Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His Collected Poems appeared in 2006, and his most recent collection A Hundred Doors (2011) won the Irish Times New Poetry Prize. In 2001 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010.