The Nineties has been a good decade for Michael Longley: his two volumes, Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995), were marked successes; with the publication now of Longley's Selected Poems his admirers can take stock of thirty years' worth of writing by the best lyric poet currently at work in Ireland or Britain. This new Selected Poems might appear disarmingly slim, and it is true that the poet has been severe in his methods of selection, producing a book which is no substitute for an eventual Collected. On the other hand, this volume has its own integrity of design, so that it makes a definite and distinctive impact on its own terms.
It is a sign of real (and very rare) achievement when we can say of a poet that his poems have attained a kind of anonymity; that is, they have become self-sufficient, completely absorbing to the point where the first-person voice is both inevitable and transparent. When Longley uses the word "I" in his poems, he does much more than talk about himself. "Frozen Rain" begins with a stanza in which the poet's voice seems to speak for the poem itself:
I slow down the waterfall to a chandelier,
Filaments of daylight, bones fleshed out by ice
That recuperate in their bandages of glass
And, where the lake behaves like a spirit-level,
I save pockets of air for the otter to breathe.
What is happening here is the creation of a world in which the precision of observation not only enacts itself in the phrasing and perfectly pitched rhythm, but is at the same time able to voice itself: "I slow down . . .", "I save . . ." and (in the following stanza) "I magnify . . ." These three verbs, between them, contain the whole of Longley's imaginative activity in parvo.
The autobiographical depth in some of Longley's later poems can be employed to heartbreaking effect, but it is always felt alongside a (sometimes shocking) sense of things that cannot be saved, or slowed down. "The Ice-Cream Man", Longley's poem about a victim of terrorist murder, resolves itself in the verb "I named", and lists twenty-one "wild flowers of the Burren/ I had seen in one day"; the effect is one of the strangest - and most moving - in modern poetry. It may seem odd that this most convincing and honest of poetic voices should be at the same time profoundly unselfconscious and self-effacing in terms of large-scale authorial ambition. The paradox, however, is one at the heart of all true lyric poetry: the first-person voice cannot afford dishonesty, but neither can it breach fidelity to its material - the poem's subject - or its element - the poem's form.
Preoccupations with the poet's public role, or with poetry's authority in the face of suffering, allow the sense of oeuvre to seep into a poem, often forcing on writers the well-intentioned dishonesty which poetry cannot afford. Longley has always understood this, and the ways in which this Selected Poems embodies a sense of development and increasing depth are not those of the self-conscious oeuvre; instead, the book consists of poems which, though they can be read in sequence, can also stand alone, each one an exemplary exercise of the lyric voice.
Any poet in Longley's time and place has perhaps been under special pressures in maintaining such piercing clarity and fidelity to his art. The question (if it is a question) of how lyric poetry could be written in Northern Ireland through the Troubles is one about which Longley has always been properly wary; in his career so far, such answers as it has received have been expressed partly in terms of poetry's formal shapes and possibilities. Selected Poems allows us to watch the fascinating changes in Longley's formal habits, from the perfectly poised rhymed stanzas of his first book, No Continuing City, through the barer, understated rhythmic and sound patterns of much of his 1970s work, towards the long lines and syntactic mastery of his most recent poems, including his versions of Homer. If variety is marked here, so is continuity; the poetry seems to possess, from first to last, a surefootedness in its forms which speaks eloquently about and to the circumstances that surround it.
Longley is one of the very few poets at any time who can make form new, living, and inevitable. His four-line poem entitled "Form" catches this exactly:
Trying to tell it all to you and cover everything
Is like awakening from its grassy form the hare:
In that make-shift shelter your hand, then my hand,
Mislays the hare and the warmth it leaves behind.
Poetry that knows the uniqueness of all that escapes it, and can find the right music and cadences for its absence, is poetry of a high order. Selected Poems is an ideal introduction to Longley, one which proves time and again his distinctiveness, but which also speaks persuasively for poetry's capacity, through form, to be true to the things and people that must give it life.
Peter McDonald's most recent volume of poems is Adam's Dream (1996)