Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!

Become a Readings Member. Sign in or sign up for free!

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre or sign out.

A Hundred Doors
Paperback

A Hundred Doors

$28.99
Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to your wishlist.

Michael Longley has remarkable powers of reinvention. Certain themes remain constant–the natural world, war, violence, love, friendship, art, death–but they also keep changing because the forms and genres of his poetry never stand still. In A Hundred Doors a sinuous short line complements his variations on pentameter and hexameter. Longley’s interlacing of individual lyrics, so that a diverse collection seems a single poem, intensifies in the shadow of mortality. A sequence about his grandchildren’s births is counterpointed by elegies, including Longley’s continuing elegy for the Great War dead. The Mayo townland Carrigskeewaun, with its cast of flora and fauna, also takes on fresh guises. Longley is among Europe’s foremost ecological poets. Yet Carrigskeewaun is ultimately symbolic, a microcosm, a soul-arena. A Hundred Doors roams in time and space. The title poem evokes the oldest Byzantine church in Greece: Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. The remains of a Greek temple ache beneath its floor. Wild orchids, which crop up in Greece and the Italian Garfagnana as well as Ireland, are among the collection’s multiple doors. Others are music and paintings, cloudberry jam from Lapland, a Shetland pony. This is work of power, precision and delicacy: poems that bend and magnify the daylight, poems by a master craftsman. Winner of the DLR Poetry Now Award.

Read More
In Shop
Out of stock
Shipping & Delivery

$9.00 standard shipping within Australia
FREE standard shipping within Australia for orders over $100.00
Express & International shipping calculated at checkout

MORE INFO
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Wake Forest University Press
Date
1 May 2011
Pages
89
ISBN
9781930630567

Michael Longley has remarkable powers of reinvention. Certain themes remain constant–the natural world, war, violence, love, friendship, art, death–but they also keep changing because the forms and genres of his poetry never stand still. In A Hundred Doors a sinuous short line complements his variations on pentameter and hexameter. Longley’s interlacing of individual lyrics, so that a diverse collection seems a single poem, intensifies in the shadow of mortality. A sequence about his grandchildren’s births is counterpointed by elegies, including Longley’s continuing elegy for the Great War dead. The Mayo townland Carrigskeewaun, with its cast of flora and fauna, also takes on fresh guises. Longley is among Europe’s foremost ecological poets. Yet Carrigskeewaun is ultimately symbolic, a microcosm, a soul-arena. A Hundred Doors roams in time and space. The title poem evokes the oldest Byzantine church in Greece: Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. The remains of a Greek temple ache beneath its floor. Wild orchids, which crop up in Greece and the Italian Garfagnana as well as Ireland, are among the collection’s multiple doors. Others are music and paintings, cloudberry jam from Lapland, a Shetland pony. This is work of power, precision and delicacy: poems that bend and magnify the daylight, poems by a master craftsman. Winner of the DLR Poetry Now Award.

Read More
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Wake Forest University Press
Date
1 May 2011
Pages
89
ISBN
9781930630567