Selected Poems

Louis MacNeice, Edna Longley, Michael Longley

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571263523
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

'I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.'
Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.'

Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Thalassa
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Trains in the Distance
• Poussin
• River in Spate
• Mayfly
• An Eclogue for Christmas
• Eclogue by a Five-barred Gate
• Valediction
• Belfast
• Birmingham
• Turf-stacks
• Spring Voices
• Nature Morte
• Sunday Morning
• August
• Morning Sun
• Train to Dublin
• Wolves
• Snow
• Carrickfergus
• Eclogue from Iceland
• Postscript to Iceland
• Hidden Ice
• The Brandy Glass
• The Sunlight on the Garden
• The Hebrides
• Leaving Barra
• Chess
• Bagpipe Music
• from Autumn Journal
• Prognosis
• Stylite
• Entirely
• London Rain
• from Trilogy for X
• The Closing Album
• Meeting Point
• Order to View
• from Novelettes
• Death of an Actress
• Flight of the Heart
• Autobiography
• Conversation
• The Ear
• Entered in the Minutes
• Perdita
• Cradle Song for Eleanor
• Prayer Before Birth
• Brother Fire
• Neutrality
• The Mixer
• Epitaph for Liberal Poets
• The Springboard
• The Casualty
• When We Were Children
• Corner Seat
• Carrick Revisited
• The Strand
• Last before America
• Western Landscape
• Under the Mountain
• The Cyclist
• Woods
• Elegy for Minor Poets
• Autolycus
• Slow Movement
• from Day of Returning
• from Flowers in the Interval
• from Autumn Sequel
• To Posterity
• from A Hand of Snapshots
• Beni Hasan
• The Tree of Guilt
• House on a Cliff
• Figure of Eight
• Death of an Old Lady
• Apple Blossom
• The Riddle
• The Slow Starter
• from Dark Age Glosses
• Nature Notes
• Sleeping Winds
• Sunday in the Park
• Variation on Heraclitus
• Reflections
• Hold-up
• The Wiper
• The Truisms
• The Blasphemies
• Selva Oscura
• All Over Again
• Soap Suds
• Déjà Vu
• Round the Corner
• The Suicide
• Flower Show
• The Taxis
• After the Crash
• Another Cold May
• Ravenna
• Charon
• The Introduction
• Birthright
• Sports Page
• The Habits
• from As in their Time
• Star-gazer
• Coda
• Index of Titles
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright