Michael Longley, one of Ireland’s leading poets, died on Wednesday, January 22nd 2025 in Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital following a short illness.

His 13 collections have received many awards, including the Whitbread Prize, the TS Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. Ash Keys: New Selected Poems was published last July to mark his 85th birthday, bringing together more than 50 years of poetry, from his first collection, No Continuing City (1969), to The Slain Birds (2022).

In 2015 he was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize for his collection The Stairwell (Jonathan Cape).  In his acceptance speech in Toronto (June 4^th, 2015), Longley said he had been writing since he was 15 years old.  “It’s my life.  It’s my religion.  It’s the way I make sense of the world,” he said.  The jury described Longley’s The Stairwell as ‘a book by a major poet writing at the height of his powers’. What follows here is a selective and subjective analysis and review of the major themes and issues which frequently recur in Longley’s poetry.

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