Ash Keys: New Selected Poems

The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem ＂ Ash Keys.＂ The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be an image for poems in search of their readers. This selection, based on thirteen individual collections, represents Longley’s unusual range as a lyric poet. It shows how his themes, genres, and forms have evolved and interlaced since the 1960s. Love, violence, the natural world, art, psychodrama, family, the Great War, the Homeric past, and Northern Ireland’s troubled present cohabit in these pages-- as do depth, wit, and beauty. Longley’s poems of the west of Ireland, which pivot on Carrigskeewaun, his ＂ soul landscape,＂ have also made him a pioneer of ＂ eco-poetry.＂ In 2022, Longley was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize for poetry, a major international prize. Announcing the award, the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome stressed ＂ the contemporary relevance of his themes and their cultural implications,＂ and said: ＂ Longley is an extraordinary poet of landscape, particularly of the Irish West, which he observes with the delicate and passionate attention of an ecologist, and a tragic singer of Ireland and its dramatic history. But he has also addressed the seduction, conquest, and fascination of love, as well as the shock of war in all ages, the tragedy of the Holocaust and of the gulags, and the themes of loss, grief, and pity.＂

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. 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. For his lifetime achievement in poetry, he was awarded the 2022 Feltrinelli Poetry Prize and in 2024 the International Roma Prize. Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty-five years. He is the author of fourteen collections. Among his awards are the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Pigott Poetry Prize, the 2017 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry, and many others. 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 eleven 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. 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.