The seven previously unpublished poems in Cenotaph of Snow add a fresh perspective to Michael Longley's selection of war-themed poems, ranging from 'In Memoriam', written in 1965, to 'Sleep & Death', composed in August 2002. Longley writes: 'These are poems about war, not war poems. You have to be a war poet to write war poems. I am a non-combatant drawn to the subject of war for a number of reasons, including: 1) my father fought in the First World War, was decorated for bravery and - an old-fashioned patriot - joined up again in 1939; 2) my native Ulster has been disfigured for thirty years by fratricidal violence; 3) I revere the poets of 1914-1918 (Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Sorley, Blunden, Thomas, Jones) and their successors of 1939-1945 (Douglas, Lewis); 4) in my forties I rediscovered Homer, first the Odyssey and then the Iliad which is the most powerful of all war poems as well as being the greatest poem about death. My versions of passages from Homer have allowed me to say things that I might not otherwise have been able to articulate. These, then, are the preoccupations behind Cenotaph of Snow.'


An archetypal elegy depicts "shell cases from the last war filled with flowers." War—what it does to combatants and to their children—becomes a preoccupation throughout Longley's work, especially in the haunted Gorse Fires (1991) and the mellifluous Snow Water (2004).


Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. From 1970 to 1991 he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of Aosdana. His collections include The Echo Gate (1979), Gorse Fires (1991), which won the Whitbread Prize, and The Ghost Orchid (1995). His most recent collection, The Weather in Japan (2000), won the Irish Times Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 1998. He is the editor of 20th Century Irish Poems (Faber). In 2001 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.