The Friday Poem on 11th April 2025

Carl Tomlinson explores how a small townland in County Mayo was a source of inspiration for Michael Longley, and looks at his New Selected Poems, 'Ash Keys' (Penguin, 2024).

BETWEEN HOVERS
in memory of Joe O’Toole

And not even when we ran over the badger
Did he tell me he had cancer, Joe O’Toole
Who was psychic about carburettor and clutch
And knew a folk cure for the starter-engine.
Backing into the dark we floodlit each hair
Like a filament of light our lights had put out
Somewhere between Kinnadoohy and Thallabaun.
I dragged it by two gritty paws into the ditch.
Joe spotted a ruby where the canines touched.
His way of seeing me safely across the duach
Was to leave his porch light burning, its sparkle
Shifting from widgeon to teal on Corragaun Lake.
I missed his funeral. Close to the stony roads
He lies in Killeen Churchyard over the hill.
This morning on the burial mound at Templedoomore
Encircled by a spring tide and taking in
Cloonaghmanagh and Claggan and Carrigskeewaun,
The townlands he’d wandered tending cows and sheep,
I watched a dying otter gaze right through me
At the islands in Clew Bay, as though it were only
Between hovers and not too far from the holt.

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‘Between Hovers’ is from Ash Keys by Michael Longley (Penguin, 2024) – thanks to Penguin for letting us reproduce it here.

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A hollow for her hip-bone

If you know anything about Michael Longley you’re probably aware of his maxim, “If I knew where the poems come from, I’d go there.” This sentence is so attached to his name, and his writing that last year’s BBC documentary about him was titled Where Poems Come From. Viewers and readers might be forgiven for thinking the poems ‘come from’ a townland in County Mayo called Carrigskeewaun, where the Longley family holidayed for 40 years. Writing in the Irish Times, in 2009, Michael Viney suggested it nourished one third of his output.

What I gathered from Ash Keys, New Selected Poems, published by Cape Poetry in 2024 to mark Longley’s 85th birthday, is that although the origins of poems are ultimately mysterious, Carrigskeewaun was indeed where many of the poems came to Longley. That physical location was also a psychological, or even spiritual, source of inspiration. I want to explore why this might be.

Longley grew up in a Belfast Protestant community, where he later saw “the burnt-out houses of / The Catholics we’d scarcely loved” (‘To Derek Mahon’) and went on to form important friendships inside that community (with Mahon) and across the sectarian divide (with Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney). He later spent time in both Great Britain and the Irish Republic. He saw the Troubles at first hand. He was an urban dweller with a countryman’s deep connection to the living world. According to BBC Notes for schools, Longley has said: "Carrigskeewaun is unbelievably beautiful - it’s the most magical place in the world for me. It’s the Garden of Eden and I often think about it. If I am depressed I go for a walk in my mind up the path to the cottage around the little ruined out houses and I stand taking in the view even though I am in Belfast or London or New York."

Carrigskeewaun’s influence on Longley’s poetry is threefold. It offers distance, it offers rest, and it’s an essentially rural counterpoint to the poet’s generally urban life. For example, we can see the importance of distance in a poem published in 1972, the year nearly 500 people were killed in the Troubles. ‘To Seamus Heaney’ is where Carrigskeewaun first appears by name in Ash Keys. Longley contrasts “the speckled hill, the plovers’ shore” of his surroundings with the distant “sick counties” of Ulster where:

We sleepwalk through a No Man’s Land
Lipreading to an Orange Band.

Further into the book, in ‘Carrigskeewaun’, Longley acknowledges that he’s a privileged visitor whose presence is intermittent: “I join all the men who have squatted here”. In ‘Between Hovers’ we read that Longley missed the funeral of a local, to whom he felt close. It’s not clear whether the dead man’s reticence about his final illness was because of natural reserve, or due to Longley’s being an outsider “try[ing] to put their district on the map” (‘Company’). The poem allows for both readings.

Distance needs a journey to create it. ‘To Derek Mahon’ sees the two friends heading west where, as “strangers in that parish”, they find distance from “the stereophonic nightmare / Of the Shankill and the Falls”. Many of the poems show Longley walking, an immediate way to create distance. For example, in ‘Fifty Years’ he addresses his wife:

You have walked with me again and again
Up the stony path to Carrigskeewaun
And paused among the fairy rings to pick
Mushrooms for breakfast and for poetry.

Similarly, there are walks with grandchildren in ‘The Wren’, or alone in ‘Age’.

In 'Ash Keys' it's clear that Carrigskeewaun also offers rest:

In the middle of the field
I stand talking to myself

Here he is at peace, among nature and agriculture’s persistent activity, and this seems to be the condition needed for poems to come to him. This 1979 poem is an example of how the countryside allows him to slow down. Similarly, in ‘Age’ from nearly 40 years later:

I make little space for philosophising.
I walk ever more slowly to gate and stile.

It’s a place for quiet companionship:

Dawns and dusks here should consist of
Me scooping a hollow for her hip-bone,
The stony headland a bullaun, a cup
To balance her body in like water:

Then a slow awakening to the swans

There is a space for for fishing with friends in ‘Level Pegging’, and time with the family in ‘The Leveret, and ‘The Wren’. Besides walks and birdwatching and picnics, in ‘Above Dooaghtry’, Carrigskeewaun also offers Longley a glimpse of his final rest:

Where the duach rises to a small plateau
That overlooks the sand dunes from Dooaghtry
To Roonkeel, and just beyond the cottage’s
Higgledy perimeter fence-posts
At Carrigskeewaun, bury my ashes

This is a theme he revisits in other poems, often mentioning the local burial mound (for example, in ‘Level Pegging’, ‘In Mayo’, and ‘After Amergin’). Longley’s deep attachment to Carrigskeewaun can only have been strengthened by his having chosen it as the place where his ashes would be buried.

Despite his frequent rapture in its presence, Longley’s engagement with the natural world is neither fey or daisy-chainy. He imagines the beautiful ‘Lizard Orchid’ being re-established by war:

Did the muddy boots of Tommies
Really bring back to England
From the Great War lizard-orchid
Seeds […]?

Animals are not sentimentalised: “a dying otter gaze[s] right through” him in ‘Between Hovers’, porpoises have “meaningless smiles” in ‘Remembering Carrigskeewaun’, and in ‘Casualty’ a dead sheep is a buffet table for a procession of scavengers “each / Looking for the easiest way in”. He summons wildflowers to stand for the flavours of ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ after the man is murdered. He deliberately draws a contrast between the place where death comes at its due time (Carrigskeewaun) and the streets of Belfast, where it may arrive at any moment.

Carrigskeewaun is more than a natural paradise. It is made and defined by humans, the ‘duach’ to which Longley often refers is the summer grazing land on the mountains. It contains the living, including Longley’s family, and the dead:

It isn’t really a burial mound
Reflected there, but all that remains
Of a sandy meadow, a graveyard
Where it was easy to dig the graves.

(from ‘Spring Tide’)

But not every location has a place name. “There’s a hazel copse near the lake without a name”, (‘Ceilidh’), although plant and animal names are precise. Paul Muldoon, in his introduction to the collection, calls Longley’s litanies of flora and fauna “a spiritual experience and a form of prayer”. They can give the poems the feel of a lush Flemish tapestry. The starkness of the nameless lake or copse in ‘Ceilidh’ frees that element of the landscape, at least, from relentless human sense-making. This seems a necessary note, especially in a poem about death. Sometimes we need to be reminded that sometimes there is no sense to be made.

Longley himself synthesises these unifying ideas of distance, rest, and nature more cogently than I have managed in ‘The West’:

I listen for news through the atmospherics,
A crackle of sea-wrack,spinning driftwood,
Waves like distant traffic, news from home,
Or watch myself, as through a sandy lens,
Materialising out of the heat-shimmers
And finding my way for ever along
The path to this cottage

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Carl Tomlinson lives on a smallholding in Oxfordshire. He works as a business coach and virtual finance director. His work been published online, in anthologies, and in Orbis, South, The Hope Valley Journal and The Alchemy Spoon. His debut pamphlet, Changing Places, was published in 2021 by Fair Acre Press.

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Michael Longley’s thirteen collections have received many awards, among them the Whitbread Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast. In 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize for a lifetime’s achievement.

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As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021. If you like Carl Tomlinson’s writing, try his reviews of England’s Green by Zaffar Kunial (Faber, 2022), Earth House by Matthew Hollis (Bloodaxe, 2023), or Eleanor Among The Saints by Rachel Mann (Carcanet, 2024).

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