A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley

A New Map: The Poetry of Migrant Workers in Italy Mia Lecomte & Luigi Bonaffini, eds. Lega In the introduction, editor Mia Lecomte remarks that the “literature of migration” has become an important and lasting aspect of Italian literature. Complex in both language and subject matter—the poets represented in the anthology are not Italian and often must employ a “cursory” language —the poems collected in this anthology manifest the immigrant experience. Over fifteen migrant poets’ works are collected in this bilingual anthology. Les Murray Taller When Prone Farrar, Straus & Giroux Les Murray’s newest collection of poetry— his twelfth, and the first to be published in nearly five years—was a New York Times Notable Book for 2011. Invoking the mythos of the Australian pastoral, the poems experiment with various forms throughout the collection. Some are meditative , some satirical, and others elegiac, displaying Murray’s poetic versatility. Nota Bene In the world of these poems, real connection and coherence are not possible , and the speaker insists, “Don’t tell me about trying again, or the easy way out – / no matter which thread I follow, / I return to the hard, wet knot.” But “I move, because movement is life,” though “Times-primeval stays right on my tail.” While “Ode to Jellyfish” and a few other poems resemble more closely what many think of as poetry, the real interest, and quality, of most of the poems comes from Katkus’s struggle to reduce painful complexity to “a small, bearable dose / of anarchy ,” though things are often at the very edge of bearable. Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Michael Longley. A Hundred Doors. Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2011. isbn 9781930630567 Peace has come to County Mayo. Michael Longley, a poet who has often interlaced meditations on poetic calling and keen observations of evocative , dramatic landscapes with his elegies for victims of the Great War and of Ireland’s Troubles, has reached a sense of much-deserved contentment . Even when he turns his hand to elegize or recall his father’s valor in war, he appears to have found serenity. It had never been far out of grasp—Longley’s poems have always radiated a sense of gentle goodwill, have always been attuned to harmonies of person and place—but that goodwill and those harmonies were pierced by recollections of violence and trauma. Now, six grandchildren later, Longley is a generous connoisseur of the perceptual world. He introduces us, as well as his descendants, to fauna and flora both common and rare, for which “growing nowhere else / In the world was enough.” They are captured in crafted forms that are measured yet light, shaped yet not rigid, allowing us to be surprised rather than lulled by their rhythms. Their voice is convivial and extraordinarily warm—even in poems addressed to others (friends, grandchildren, wife), the poetic speaker holds us close. A major concern now seems to be the work of memory upon the present : the “unanticipated” resonance of an observed object brings back the past with remarkable immediacy. We see one scene in two temporal dimensions ; or rather, we ask ourselves if we are seeing one scene in two ways January–February 2012 | 71 or two scenes, the remembered and the present moment. Are we seeing through memory, or does memory dwell side by side with present perception ? Which is more “true,” if such a word has any place in discussions of lyric perception? These questions lead us into deep water, though Longley ’s lyrics have a readily accessible beauty that merges with, but is never obscured by, their subterranean questioning . A Hundred Doors does not lead us into new territory, but the familiar ground of Longley’s beloved Carrigskeewaun is seen in a newly prismatic perspective. The poet is confronted by his memories and with a future that holds “my final resting place,” and this sense of an ending —one’s own ending—is accepted with the equanimity of one who feels truly at home. Longley’s verse invites us to read autobiographically; he is the same age as when his compatriot Seamus Heaney contemplated beginnings and endings, and when W. B. Yeats composed “Under Ben Bulben,” yet Longley

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