Ash Keys
Michael Longley
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
A collection of Michael Longley's greatest poems, spanning an extraordinary career of sixty years as one of the Belfast triumverate, alongside Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon
'One of the world's greats' IRISH NEWS
'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' SEAMUS HEANEY
The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem ‘Ash Keys’. The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be an image for poems in search of their readers. This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley’s unusual range as a lyric poet.
It shows how his themes, genres and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages – as do depth, wit and beauty.
'His work is of the level that would be befitting of a Novel Prize for Literature' MICHAEL D HIGGINS
'Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first' Times Literary Supplement