Angel Hill

A Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the Year'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' Seamus HeaneyWinner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prizeShortlisted for the 2017 Forward PrizeA Guardian / Herald Scotland Book of the YearWinner of the 2017 PEN Pinter prizeShortlisted for the 2017 Forward PrizeA remote townland in County Mayo, Carrigskeewaun has been for nearly fifty years Michael Longley's home-from-home, his soul-landscape. Its lakes and mountains, wild animals and flowers, its moody seas and skies have for decades lit up his poetry. Now they overflow into Angel Hill, his exuberant new collection. In addition, Longley has been exploring Lochalsh in the Western Highlands where his daughter the painter Sarah Longley now lives with her family. She has opened up for him her own soul-landscape with its peculiar shapes and intense colours. In Angel Hill the imaginations of poet and painter intermingle and two exacting wildernesses productively overlap. Love poems and elegies and heart-rending reflections on the Great War and the Northern Irish Troubles add further weight to Michael Longley's outstanding eleventh collection. Angel Hill will undoubtedly delight this great poet's many admirers.

Short-listed for Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017 (UK)

“Michael Longley's Angel Hill ...is at once elegiac and celebratory, and achingly beautiful . Longley has honed his poetry to the bone, but how the bone does shine .”

Michael Longley’s Angel Hill…is at once elegiac and celebratory, and achingly beautiful. Longley has honed his poetry to the bone, but how the bone does shine. -- John Banville Guardian, Books of the Year
There are few contemporary poets as likeable as Michael Longley. That’s not because his poems are simply amiable, but because he looks at things hard and clearly and invites his readers to share his acts of seeing… Longley is one of few contemporary poets who can capture Homer’s spare and unrelenting humanity… The Stairwell (2014) – one of the loveliest collections of verse in the past decade… Literary historians of the future will no doubt position Longley among his fellow Irish poets Heaney and Mahon as the heirs of Yeats, and if not children of the Troubles then their wise observers. -- Colin Burrow London Review of Books
The pleasure of reviewing becomes a privilege when presented with poets and poetry of this quality... To adopt and adapt a phrase from The Beatles...Longley in [his]communion of the spirit and the soul gift[s] us with alchemical compounds, “saviours of the human race”. -- Hayden Murphy Herald Scotland
Thoughtful, elegant poems that celebrate family life, grandchildren, and a long marriage. -- The Irish Times Rosita Boland
Unafraid to capture the intimacies and specifics of this life, Longley is also one of the very few poets able to take us, time and again, to a place as “Wild and melodious” as the birdsong he celebrates. -- Fran Brearton Guardian
Lush and elegiac, delicate and muscular, melancholy and thrilling. -- John Banville Observer
Quietly intense and lyrically beautiful… True greatness shows in poems in memory of his friend Seamus Heaney, in exquisite evocations of landscapes in Ireland and Scotland, and in celebrations of married love. -- Bel Mooney Daily Mail
Angel Hill encapsulates, in rich and powerful verse, everything that it is to be Michael Longley… His poetry has peace to it, a sense of contentment... It has all the craft and meaning of someone who’s been writing poetry for fifty years. It is, at its best, timeless. -- Barney Pite Cherwell Newspaper
Already the virtues of a Longley poem are on display: the easy conversational manner, the unselfconscious shaping of line and stanza, the ability to sound a genuinely affectionate, unsentimental note. -- John Greening The Times Literary Supplement

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 and his wife the critic Edna Longley live and work. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime's achievement.

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