Ghosts of hedgers and ditchers,The ash trees rattling keysAbove tangles of hawthornAnd bramble, alder and gorse,Would keep me from pacingCommonage, long perspectivesAnd conversations, a fieldThat touches the horizon.I am herding cattle thereAs a boy, as the old manFollowing in his footstepsWho begins the task again,As though there’d never beenIn some interim or hollowWives and children, milkAnd buttermilk, market days.Far from the perimeterOf watercress and berries,In the middle of the fieldI stand talking to myself,While the ash keys scatterAnd the gates creak openAnd the barbed wire rustsTo hay-ropes strung with thorns.
Ash Keys
Michael Longley
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“Ash Keys” from ASH KEYS: NEW SELECTED POEMS: by Michael Longley.
Published by Wake Forest University Press on July 27, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Michael Longley.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Bobbie Hanvey
Bobbie Hanvey
Michael Longley’s thirteen collections have received many awards, among them the Whitbread Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he lived with his wife the critic Edna Longley until his passing in January 2025. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
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.
“A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.”
—Seamus Heaney
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