Michael Longley Special Offer
• Poetry
• Non Fiction
• Signed Limited Edition
Description: Until 28th February 2010 these two limited edition Michael Longley chapbooks will be offered at a discount of 20% when purchased together. A Jovial Hullabaloo In the spring of 2008, Michael Longley was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry. His inaugural lecture, published here for the first time, constitutes ‘an autobiography in poetry’. He writes movingly and entertainingly about how he discovered poetry and celebrates some of the poems and poets who have mattered to him, from childhood memories of the King James Bible, which saturated his mind with beautiful words, and the discovery in his teens first of Keats, de la Mare and Yeats, and then of living Irish writers such as Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice. Descriptions of Longley's first attempts to write poetry – ‘a combination of hormonal commotion and aesthetic awakening’ – lead on to his meetings with Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney, their mutual encouragement and shared interests, and to Longley's lasting enthusiasm for poetry of the past and poets of his own and younger generations. Rich in anecdote, typically generous in opinion, Longley's poetic credo makes for heartwarming and inspirational reading. This edition of 150 chapbooks is bound in Hahnemühle Bugra Butten wrappers and was one of the last books to be printed at Rampant Lions, before Sebastian Carter’s retirement from letterpress-printing in December 2008. Wavelengths: Wood engravings by Jeffrey Morgan Wavelengths is a companion volume to Michael Longley’s previous Enitharmon chapbooks, Cenotaph of Snow (2003) and The Rope-Makers (2005), letterpress-printed at The Stonehouse Fine Press. It contains a selection of the translations which Longley describes as ‘fundamental to my imaginative development…versions mainly from Latin and Greek – which reflect my preoccupations and feel to me like my own poems.’ Wavelengths includes translations from 1962 of two Greek lyrics, versions after the love elegies of Sextus Propertius, and versions from Longley’s near contemporaries – the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu, the Dutch poets Hendrik Marsman and Ida Gerhardt and as an unexpected and charming bonus, a poem originally written in French by the Welsh painter Gwen John.
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