Angel Hill

By Michael Longley

Winner:
2017 PEN Pinter Prize

A 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 colors. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943666157

Book preview

nests.

Inlet

for Kathleen Jamie

I have seen your face

Among the pebbles

In a Highland pool.

Seeping into grass

The sea at spring tide

Leaves bladderwrack there.

You will have noticed

A planetary rose-hip

Hanging from the sky,

A slippery plank

Bridging the inlet

And the last of the sea,

A mussel shell

Filling up with rain

As you reach the pool.

Telling Yellow

after Winifred Nicholson: a found poem

Yesterday I set out

To pick a yellow bunch

To place as a lamp

On my table in dull,

Rainy weather. I picked

Iceland poppies, marigolds,

Yellow iris; my bunch

Did not tell yellow. I

Added sunflowers, canary

Pansies, buttercups,

Dandelions; no yellower.

I added to my butter-

Like mass, two everlasting

Peas, magenta pink,

And all my yellows broke

Into luminosity.

Orange and gold

And primrose each

Singing its note.

Cowslip

haiku beginning with a line of Barbara Guest

The way a cowslip bends

Recalls a cart track,

Crushed sunlight at my