Gorse Fires

Longley’s skilfulness and experience are evident in poems where, in the choice of a single word, the focus of the description shifts… For all its looking back, however, the book feels curiously timeless… In his poems of the natural world, Longley is still a master of miniatures: there is an astonished, almost shortsighted intensity to the way he looks at what lies around him, in his familiar Carrigskeewaun habitat as well as in the Scottish locales this collection also visits.

John McAuliffe, The Irish Times

A contemporary who should endure over the life of our language

Donald Hall

Longley may not possess, or want, the international glamour of some of his contemporaries, but the poems in Gorse Fires, both individually and collectively, bewitch with the magic of coherence

Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian

A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders

Seamus Heaney

Michael Longley's poems have matched a sense of history and the brutal present with a recurrent feeling for the lyrical moment and the fragility of experience

James Fenton

His measured rhythms, skilfully crafted metaphors and elaborate syntax always insist on poetry's origins in ceremony, its powers to commemorate or dignify

Mark Ford