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An Interview with Michael Longley
(Originally published in Books Ireland, 1995)
Pat Boran
Michael Longley's departure from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in March 1991 coincided to the very day with the publication of his last collection, Gorse Fires. That book won him wide critical acclaim and a prestigious Whitbread Poetry Award. This month Cape publish The Ghost Orchid, perhaps an even finer collection than Gorse Fires and a book which, like its predecessor, has a rare sense of unity about it. Visiting Longley at his home in Belfast (where BBC Radio 3 plays in both the study cum living room and the kitchen -Longley, who has recently bought a CD player says he can't walk past a Virgin Megastore "without going in and spending all my pocket money"), I find a man who is relaxed and welcoming ( with two generous helpings of Japanese wakame seaweed soup), and begin by asking him to what extent he might be said to compose books rather than individual poems. "If you look after the poems the collections will look after themselves," says Longley. It is only when he is well into the work that he becomes aware of themes and begins to put the book together "in much the same way as I try to write a poem There comes a point where I'll write a poem which I realise is the first of the next book, and then the new collection complete. I don't agree with people who think of books as random cut-offs, you know, like pounds of sausages." He is, he says, aiming for a sort of "tweedy weave", the various themes emerging and re-emerging like coloured threads. Indeed one of the great delights of The Ghost Orchid is the way in which, in a poem such as 'River and Fountain', his many concerns and images dovetail together and cast resonances back through the earlier poems, even through the earlier books. "You don't embark on it that way," he says. "It would be very bad if in your twenties or thirties you were self-consciously aware of your own themes and preoccupations It takes time for things to become preoccupations. And it transpires - I mean I didn't decide on it - it transpires that among my preoccupations are the natural world as manifest especially in Mayo, Co. Clare, the catastrophe of the First World War, the influence of that catastrophe on subsequent Irish and European history and politics My concerns continue to be Eros and Thanatos, the traditional subject matter of the lyric: love, death, sex, children, childhood, nature, the cycle of the seasons, day and night It's slightly scary to look back over my books. It's also reassuring." This is not to say, however, that this traditional subject matter does not contain surprises. Partly because of the way the new book is arranged, the reader often finds himself catapulted back or forward through history as the subject expands from, say, the First World War to all wars, all conflicts. An illustration of this might be the poem which deals with the aftermath of the killing of Hector by Achilles and which Longley has entitled, resonantly, 'Ceasefire'. Something similar occurs in 'The Campfires', a poem which appears to be about the 1914-18 conflict but in which we suddenly come across, not tanks or armoured cars, but chariots, bringing the Greek thread back into view again. When another poem, 'River and Fountain', about his college days, begins, 'I am walking backwards into the future like a Greek', and later contains the line that begins 'Walking forwards into the past', I wonder if this turning backwards and inside-out of time is an integral part of his vision? "In a way the Greeks were right and we are wrong," he says. "We talk about the future being before us, whereas in fact it's unknown, it's behind us. It's something we can't see What we can see is the past, it's there in front of us. It's a rather extraordinary idea." He laughs: "It gave me a good first line." Whatever the direction, it's apparent that for Longley great importance is placed on the journey and the observations which come during it, whether through time or his beloved natural world. Indeed there is an Adamic quality to many of the poems, a love of naming things and of singing the names of things already named by others. "Naming anything well is an essentially poetic act," he says, citing the poem 'Trade Winds' from Gorse Fires as an example, though he might as easily have chosen any of a dozen or so poems from the present volume. "I carry a little notebook around with me and in it I make lists of things where I happen to find them." This poetic act, he reminds me, can be traced back to the catalogue of ships in Homer's Iliad. The advantage of this, he suggests, is that it provides him with what he is seeking in poetry, that is "music and enchantment, not necessarily philosophical ideas." He laughs again: "I'm certainly incapable of producing any of my own." While Longley's control of form and ear for rhythm and music have been much celebrated, he is unhappy with the term 'the well-made poem', rejecting any suggestion that there might be a ready-made grid which the poet has simply to fill. "You might just as well talk about a well-made flower or a well-made tree. The sonnets of Shakespeare or Donne aren't well-made poems; they have an inevitable organic shapeliness, like a flower or a leaf or a tree.' He quotes a line from 'River and Fountain': "If prose is a river, then poetry's a fountain," suggesting that the form of a poem acts like a nozzle, producing a fountain that is both shapely and free, changing and staying the same. "Poetry," he says, "is an affair of tensions." One of the tensions in Longley's work is created by the interplay of dialects. In the new book he draws not only on standard English, but also on the sound riches of Ulster Scots, and he even rescues from obscurity a word such as 'nuddle', which the OED calls obsolete but which, suggesting as it does both nuzzle and cuddle, seems particularly appropriate in a poem about the suckling siblings Romulus and Remus. "It began with the word 'duncher' in Gorse Fires, in a poem called 'Laertes'," he says of his use of words which, for many readers, will suggest more than they immediately denote. That poem was first published in the New Yorker, but not before the amused poet received a phone call from those offices saying, "'Every grammarian in the building has been through every dictionary in the building and we can't find this word 'duncher'.' And I said, 'Well it's Belfast dialect for a flat cap. I thought everybody knew that.'" Speaking with a poet of Longley's generation, the subject of what he calls "Norn Irn and the Troubles Trash" is unavoidable, though in the new book the 'troubles' are less in evidence than before. Nevertheless, does he agree that the 'troubles' have in the past made northern poetry somehow more attractive or, to use that awful tabloid expression, more 'sexy' than, say, the neighbouring varieties? "I think undoubtedly that's true. If the poets had come from Scotland or Wales they wouldn't have had much attention. Once people were saying where are the war poets, and that was a shallow, rather journalistic question. I think now when they're saying where are the peace poets, that's also a bit shallow, because really all along what the good poets have been addressing have been communal tensions and the historical complexities that make the place what it is." If there is a central core to Longley's work, however, and to this book in particular, it is the natural world, the world of his Co. Mayo retreat, for instance, where he can observe otters in their natural habitat or look up into the depths of the night sky. "I love that great first photograph taken by an astronaut of the globe," he says. "When I look at it I think it's not just us down there. First of all you say, I wonder where Ireland is, then where Belfast is, and then, you know, where am I? But once you've got over that you think, down there are fleas, whales, tigers and baboons, tapeworms and microbes, earthworms and golden eagles" Does that change the importance of what a contemporary has teasingly called his 'wee poems' about nature, implying a kind of escapism on Longley's part? "My wee poems aren't escapist. They're dealing with the most pressing issue of all, an issue which makes political matters of nationalism and the border of Northern Ireland seem paltry in comparison. There will be nowhere for our great-grandchildren if we don't now very quickly learn from observing animals and plants. The most pressing issue is the ecological issue." Longley, born in Belfast in 1939 to parents who came from London, puts his infectious love of the natural world down to his first and subsequent visits to Mayo. "I wonder what would have happened
to me if I hadn't had the chance to go to that remote cottage
25 years ago," he muses. "That really changed me. Though
you know," he adds, obviously appreciating the double meaning
and, at the same time, neatly illustrating what he calls in one
of the poems 'the fundamental interconnectedness of all things',
"as I boy I was always interested in the birds and the bees".
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