Angel Hill

Michael Longley’s Angel Hill…is at once elegiac and celebratory, and achingly beautiful. Longley has honed his poetry to the bone, but how the bone does shine. -- John Banville * Guardian, Books of the Year *
There are few contemporary poets as likeable as Michael Longley. That’s not because his poems are simply amiable, but because he looks at things hard and clearly and invites his readers to share his acts of seeing… Longley is one of few contemporary poets who can capture Homer’s spare and unrelenting humanity… The Stairwell (2014) – one of the loveliest collections of verse in the past decade… Literary historians of the future will no doubt position Longley among his fellow Irish poets Heaney and Mahon as the heirs of Yeats, and if not children of the Troubles then their wise observers. -- Colin Burrow * London Review of Books *
The pleasure of reviewing becomes a privilege when presented with poets and poetry of this quality... To adopt and adapt a phrase from The Beatles...Longley in [his]communion of the spirit and the soul gift[s] us with alchemical compounds, “saviours of the human race”. -- Hayden Murphy * Herald Scotland *
Thoughtful, elegant poems that celebrate family life, grandchildren, and a long marriage. -- The Irish Times * Rosita Boland *
Unafraid to capture the intimacies and specifics of this life, Longley is also one of the very few poets able to take us, time and again, to a place as “Wild and melodious” as the birdsong he celebrates. -- Fran Brearton * Guardian *
Lush and elegiac, delicate and muscular, melancholy and thrilling. -- John Banville * Observer *
Quietly intense and lyrically beautiful… True greatness shows in poems in memory of his friend Seamus Heaney, in exquisite evocations of landscapes in Ireland and Scotland, and in celebrations of married love. -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail *
Angel Hill encapsulates, in rich and powerful verse, everything that it is to be Michael Longley… His poetry has peace to it, a sense of contentment... It has all the craft and meaning of someone who’s been writing poetry for fifty years. It is, at its best, timeless. -- Barney Pite * Cherwell Newspaper *
Already the virtues of a Longley poem are on display: the easy conversational manner, the unselfconscious shaping of line and stanza, the ability to sound a genuinely affectionate, unsentimental note. -- John Greening * The Times Literary Supplement *