Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas--"for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing." The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings, and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in "Totem," which represents the book itself as "a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures." "Slain birds" exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is "the merlin we cannot see." Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust, and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious "home" for the human family. It engenders "Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry." Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials--carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery--suggesting the versatility with which he remakes his own art.

Author: Michael Longley
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
Published: 09/12/2022
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 9.09h x 5.48w x 0.34d
ISBN: 9781930630994

About the Author
Michael Longley was born in Belfast where he still lives. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College Dublin where he read Classics. He has published twelve collections of poetry including Angel Hill (2017), which won the PEN Pinter Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Other volumes have earned him the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, and the Griffin International Prize. He served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010. He is married to the critic Edna Longley and has three children.