The Belfast poet Michael Longley can at first seem quiet, modest, a bit domestic. But look more closely and you find real emotional drama and, at times, an epic sweep encapsulated in his precise miniatures. His new collection, “A Hundred Doors,” is a work of celebration and benediction, but it’s also a work of observation, of careful, loving and imaginative attention to detail:
(Wake Forest University Press) - ‘A Hundred Doors: Poems’ by Michael Longley
Darkness is pouring
Through the bat’s hopeless
Veiny membrane.
Almost any other poet would have seen light coming through the bat’s wing; to see darkness there instead is the kind of inspiration that cannot be forced or willed, but must be given and received as a gift.
“A Hundred Doors” is filled with love poems: for Longley’s wife, for his friends and family, for beauty, for the world itself. Some are elegies, and most are touched by death. Longley is 72 and has always been keenly aware of the passage of time. One poem begins, “Sitting up in bed with binoculars I scan / My final resting place at Dooaghtry / Through the new window.” Another, a moving elegy for a friend, begins with Longley imagining his own ideal death:
I have imagined an ideal death in Charlie Gaffney’s
Pub in Louisburgh: he pulls me the pluperfect pint
As I, at the end of the bar next to the charity boxes,
Expire on my stool, head in hand, without a murmur.
But as he goes on to realize, “It’s Charlie Gaffney / Who has died.” The poem ends with a return to the world of the concrete and physical: “The pub might as well be empty forever now. I launch / The toy lifeboat at my elbow with an old penny.”
There is something unutterably moving about this tiny private ritual. Perhaps it is the way Longley invokes the more formal rituals we rely on to console us in the face of time and death. If “the toy lifeboat” represents the fragile individual, setting sail on the ocean of the world, it seems also to stand for poetry, the vessel by which our memories and our loves are carried from each generation to the next.
“I hope it touches the house before it dies,” Longley writes of a tree in “Mars.” And then, in the next line: “I hope it touches the house before we die.”
Jollimore is the author of “Love’s Vision” and “At Lake Scugog: Poems.”
A HUNDRED DOORS
By Michael Longley
Wake Forest Univ. 73 pp. Paperback, $12.95
Loading...
Comments