Michael Longley: The poet whose work ranged from nature to civil strife

After Heaney’s death in 2013, Longley wrote an elegy called Room to Rhyme about his friend, which was published in his later collection, Angel Hill.

Longley’s first collection, No Continuing City, had been published in 1969 – just as the Troubles started in Northern Ireland.

No Continuing City included the poem In Memoriam written in memory of Longley’s soldier father Richard, who had been wounded in World War One and later died of cancer.

Longley remained in Belfast as the Troubles worsened, writing a number of collections of poetry while working full time for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Trips with his family to the west of Ireland prompted poetry about nature, but Longley did not avoid writing about the conflict around him.

Poems like The Ice Cream Man, Wounds, Kindertotenlieder, The Linen Workers and Dusty Bluebells reflected the suffering of victims of violence with compassion.

Though Longley was well aware, as he said in a later interview, of the “deadly danger of regarding the agony of others as raw material for your art, or your art as solace for them in their suffering”.

In a later article for the New Statesman magazine, Longley wrote: “We disliked the notion that civic unrest might be good for poetry, and poetry a solace for the brokenhearted.

“We were none of us in the front line.”