A Hundred Doors

As Longley moves into hte old age that was so enabling for many of the finest poets and artists - W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman come to mind first off - his words are moving more gracefully than ever

Poetry Ireland Review

He is a major writer

John Banville

In his truest and most enduring poems, Longley manages, in Yeats's words, to hold justice and reality in a single thought without doing violence to either. The many poems in which Longley succeeds in this aim are among the great poems of our time

David Wheatley, Guardian

Longley's poems count the phenomena of the natural world with the particular deliberate pleasure of a lover's fingers wandering along the bumpy path of the vertebrae

Seamus Heaney

Longley's war poetry can stand comparison with the best of this century

Guardian

Michael Longley is a lyric poet with perfect pitch. His formal elegance seems effortless...he is a master in an old, great tradition

Elaine Feinstein, The Times

Of the modern writers who deal with conflict, I believe Michael Longley, whose father fought in the First World War, is the greatest figure we have. I carry his work with me to the war zones of the world

Fergal Kane, The Times

One of the finest lyric poets of our century

John Burnside