**The best poems of the last survivor of the legendary Belfast trio - along with Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon - published on his 85th birthday
'One of the most perfect poets alive'**
SEBASTIAN BARRY
'A master in an old, great tradition'
THE TIMES
Published to coincide with his 85th birthday, Michael Longley's New Selected Poems will look back on the extraordinary career of the last surviving member of the triumvirate of poets that rose out of Belfast in the 1960s.
This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley's unusual range as a lyric poet. It shows how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland's troubled present cohabit in these pages - as do depth, wit and beauty. Longley's poems of the west of Ireland, which pivot on Carrigskeewaun, his 'soul landscape', have also made him a pioneer of 'eco-poetry'.
In 2022 Longley was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize, a major international prize. Announcing the award, the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome stressed 'the contemporary relevance of his themes and their cultural implications', and said: 'Longley is an extraordinary poet of landscape, particularly of the Irish West, which he observes with the delicate and passionate attention of an ecologist, and a tragic singer of Ireland and its dramatic history. But he has also addressed the seduction, conquest, and fascination of love, as well as the shock of war in all ages, the tragedy of the Holocaust and of the gulags, and the themes of loss, grief and pity.'
The publication of this, his first Selected Poems since 1998, will be an opportunity for the media to look back and assess an extraordinary and most prolific career.
