The Night Before Spring

A beautiful and elegiac final collection filled with people, places, departed friends, and the pleasures of nature

With an introduction by Edna Longley

'One of the world's greats' IRISH NEWS

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

Michael Longley was a lyric poet of breathtaking depth and range, remarkable versatility and coherence. His preoccupations were love and loss, the natural world, art, history and the effects of violent conflict – from Homer through to the Great War, the Holocaust and the tragedy of Northern Ireland.

What marks Longley out for greatness is the humanity of his work, through more than a dozen collections; the way he captured the essence of our time alive: those brief instances of vision, intimate and luminous. He was a love poet, a nature poet, an elegist, but – above all – a celebrant of life.

The poems in this, his last book, pull in and out of focus – from the close examination of a flower’s petals, of jellyfish ‘like melting paperweights’, to ancient beech trees and megalithic circles; from ‘a coracle, half an acorn’ to a chance meeting in a Belfast bar with the press photographer who had shown the world ‘our blood-drenched tarmacadam’. If Longley had been asked how he could stare so deeply into things and find the truth – telling it beautifully – he might have shrugged and said, like that cameraman, ‘I take out my light-meter / And I focus the lens.’

'His work is of the level that would be befitting of a Novel Prize for Literature' MICHAEL D HIGGINS

'Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first' Times Literary Supplement