“An Otter’s Temporary Resting Place”: Michael Longley’s Western Landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the western landscape in Michael Longley’s poems, a physical, imaginary, and aesthetic space that displays some of the most sustained tensions between self and other, the ecological and the political in his work. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s ideas such as intimate strangeness, interconnectedness, and difference, this article argues that the sense of interconnectedness in Longley’s poems values an ecological interdependency that emphasizes defamiliarization, instability, strangeness, and difference. It informs a philosophy of co-existence that stands against fixed dwelling and rigid identity categorisation both within and beyond the Northern Ireland situation.