The Candlelight Master

Description

The new book from the greatest living Irish poet. *AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR* 'I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certainty.' So wrote Maria Johnston, reviewing Longley's previous book Angel Hill. Yet The Candlelight Master does not only face into shadows. The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter. Other poems about painters - Matisse, Bonnard - imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says- 'We gaze on our soul-landscapes / More intensely with every year.' The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures. His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots 'Hochmagandy'. Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley's Carrigskeewaun.

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.

Michael Longley's luminous The Candlelight Master...demonstrate[s] how much poetry matters even in the most terrible of times. -- John Banville * Irish Times *Books of the Year* *