Collected Poems

Despite (or because of) sectarian violence, Belfast in the late '60s and '70s produced a brace of extraordinary poetic talents. Among them, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon moved to America and achieved international stardom, while Longley remained in Northern Ireland, developing a subtle power of his own, as this first retrospective since 1985 shows. Longley's debut volume, No Continuing City (1969), made clear his careful mastery of form, but not until Man Lying on a Wall (1976) did he establish his recognizable style: Longley's short, segmented poems and sinuous lines, often approximating Latin hexameters, exhibit an understated beauty, and yet remain conscious of violence past and present, from the Trojan War through WWI and Northern Ireland's Troubles.