A Hundred Doors (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Hundred Doors Richard Rankin Russell A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley, pp. 70. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2011. $12.95. Michael Longley has always quietly insisted that poetry—like the seemingly trivial things of this life—matters. In reading Longley, our hearts and minds are stilled; his best poetry creates a space within us, or leads us to rediscover that space, where a deep respect for all the “Incorrigibly plural” world, as his predecessor Louis MacNeice put it in “Snow,” can flourish. A Hundred Doors is Longley’s first volume since the appearance of his now happily incomplete Collected Poems in 2006. The title comes from the oldest Byzantine church in Greece, Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. This volume offers a series of largely miniature poems, glimpses into the kaleidoscopic variety of nature and human life that Longley celebrates even as longtime friends, including Helen Lewis and Charlie Gaffney pass away, and as the poet himself ponders more deeply than ever his own eventual passing. The typically bittersweet quality of his poetry is even more pronounced here, the insights even more sharply observed. In drawing again on his familiar terrain of World War I and the trenches; Belfast; and Carrigskeewaun, his adopted townland in County Mayo, Longley wrings achingly magnificent poems from landscapes we might have thought exhausted by his earlier work. If, in his earlier Carrigskeewaun poems, Longley treads somewhat lightly, feeling himself a visitor to that townland, in many of these new poems, such as “Horseshoe,” he now claims possession of that area. Finding a horseshoe “Where [End Page 156] skylarks / Rise from the sheepshitty path, God-sparks,” / Sound-glints for bridle and bridle hand,” Longley concludes, “I am the farrier in this townland.” By dint of his now-perfected marriage of form and content, he can rightly claim this title. “Horseshoe” rhymes aa bb and Longley’s use of the couplet form here—a form he was drawn to in his early poetry, but rejected for a time—suggests how adept he has become at tuning the found music of nature and shaping it into a soundscape we can enter with him. Similarly, in “At Dawn,” he revels in his sleepwalking amble “around the cottage at dawn,” when he hears “The westerly,” that “blew me wren-song, then / Wing-music” from the five visible swans he sees and hears “creaking towards / Corraguan Lake,” while he recalls having to imagine “the sixth swan / That was definitely there at the zenith.” In such a poem, Longley flirts with Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole,” which more indirectly muses upon a “missing” swan. But whereas Yeats’s poem is suffused with a melancholy tone, Longley’s is quietly ecstatic in its visionary conclusion. “At Dawn” also implicitly rebukes another poetic master for Longley—Philip Larkin—whose late, grim poem of fear about death, “Aubade,” abounds in blankness and nothingness, while Longley’s poem sings its own quietly confident morning song about the seeming super-abundance of nature. The many lovely poems that welcome a succession of grandchildren in this volume represent another strain of his delight in the fertility and variousness of nature. But even nature’s profundity cannot offer finally offer solace for those who have died, and other poems in the volume, such as “Old Soldiers,” take a stoic look at Longley’s father, a World War I veteran with whom he compares first, himself, then more lingeringly, King Priam, who had featured in Longley’s astonishing sonnet “Ceasefire,” from The Ghost Orchid (1995). In that earlier poem, Priam models the type of humble forgiveness Longley and others felt a necessary precondition for peace in Northern Ireland in his forgiveness of Achilles for killing his son Hector; here in the second quatrain of this eight-liner, we are only given a “King Priam who loved his dogs, / As my father his red setters and spaniels, / Dreaded them chewing at his pathetic corpse’s / White head and white beard and bleeding genitals.” Man’s communion with nature in such poems as “At Dawn” is stunningly reversed through what might be called Longley’s “Greek mode,” a stoic...