The Night Before Spring

**A beautiful and elegiac final collection filled with people, places, departed friends, and the pleasures of nature With an introduction by Edna Longley 'One of the world's greats'** IRISH NEWS 'A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' SEAMUS HEANEY Michael Longley was a lyric poet of breathtaking depth and range, remarkable versatility and coherence. His preoccupations were love and loss, the natural world, art, history and the effects of violent conflict – from Homer through to the Great War, the Holocaust and the tragedy of Northern Ireland. What marks Longley out for greatness is the humanity of his work, through more than a dozen collections; the way he captured the essence of our time alive: those brief instances of vision, intimate and luminous. He was a love poet, a nature poet, an elegist, but – above all – a celebrant of life. The poems in this, his last book, pull in and out of focus – from the close examination of a flower’s petals, of jellyfish ‘like melting paperweights’, to ancient beech trees and megalithic circles; from ‘a coracle, half an acorn’ to a chance meeting in a Belfast bar with the press photographer who had shown the world ‘our blood-drenched tarmacadam’. If Longley had been asked how he could stare so deeply into things and find the truth – telling it beautifully – he might have shrugged and said, like that cameraman, ‘I take out my light-meter / And I focus the lens.’ 'His work is of the level that would be befitting of a Novel Prize for Literature' MICHAEL D HIGGINS 'Michael Longley’s latest lines are just as restless and as promising as his first' Times Literary Supplement