Clothbound, limited edition, signed and numbered by the author. Plain vellum jacket. Collectible.

"like Graves he is also a war poet, of the two world wars in which his father fought, and of the war of nerves in Northern Ireland, where he lives.” [Derek Mahon, The Literary Review - 1985]


Michael Longley (born 27 July 1939) is a Northern Irish[1] poet from Belfast, Northern Ireland. His wife Edna is also an influential critic on modern Irish and British poetry.

He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. He holds honorary doctorates from Queen's University Belfast (1995) and Trinity College, Dublin (1999).

Gorse Fires (1991) won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and The Weather in Japan (2000) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He was the 2001 recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

On 6 September 2007, Longley was appointed Professor of Poetry for Ireland, a cross-border academic post set up in 1998, and previously held by John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Durcan.