Stairwell

Michael Longley

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In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley's themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is ...

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In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley's themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: &quote;I have been thinking about the music for my funeral. . .&quote; The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence-both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin's death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming.Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word &quote;stairwell&quote; is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and &quote;homeland.&quote; The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.