The Slain Birds

Using ornithology as a guide, Longley’s exhilarating songbook offers a risk assessment of our world under threat… The Slain Birds is a book of quietude and disquiet in Longley’s prolific repertoire. * Guardian *One of the most perfect poets alive. There is something in his work both ancient and modern. I read him as I might check the sky for stars. – Sebastian BarryMichael Longley’s poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience. – James FentonA contemporary who should endure over the life of our language. – Donald Hall[Longley] at 83 is so secure as a great he can write poems of simple, pellucid beauty, touching universal experience. * Daily Mail *

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 and worked with his wife, the critic Edna Longley, until his death in 2025. For his lifetime achievement in poetry he was awarded the 2022 Feltrinelli Poetry Prize, and in 2024 the International Roma Prize.

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