Michael Longley

I want you both to remember me
And what the wind-tousled wren has been saying
All day long from fence posts and the fuchsia depths,
A brain-rattling bramble-song inside a knothole.
- The Wren, Michael Longley

Michael Longley is one of the major poets of our time and The Shaking Bog presents a rare and intimate opportunity to hear him reading from his work and, afterwards, in conversation with Margaret Kelleher (Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, UCD). Longley’s work has a central place in the canon of modern Irish poetry and yet it is never too lofty. As the late Eileen Battersby wrote in The Irish Times: “Longley is alive to the moment, he sees the wonder in the ordinary. The simplest thing intrigues as much as the most profound. His poetry is both vocation and art.”

It is a great honour to welcome Michael Longley to the Glencree Valley.

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939. He is renowned for the quiet beauty of his compact, meditative lyrics. He is the author of many poetry collections, including Angel Hill (2017); The Stairwell (2015), which received the 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Ghost Orchid (2012); The Weather in Japan (2000), which won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Gorse Fires (1991), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize. In 2001 Longley was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

“A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.”
- Seamus Heaney

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