Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

InThe Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longleys themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: I have been thinking about the music for my funeral The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and theIliadis a presiding presence both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twins death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word stairwell is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and homeland.The Stairwellis a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College Dublin where he read Classics. He has published ten collections of poetry includingGorse Fires(1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, andThe Weather in Japan(2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and theIrish TimesPoetry Prize. HisCollected Poemswas published in 2006. In 2001 he received the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was awarded a CBE in 2010. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 20072010. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.

In his 75th year, the tenth collection by the greatest living Northern Irish poet

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

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