Poetry : A Tribute to Michael

Talk: ‘Beautiful Things are Difficult’: Michael Longley as ‘master craftsman’ by Florence Impens

Reading of Michael Longley poems by Gail McConnell

Monday 28 July 2025 | 7pm | £12

Michael Longley, one of the great Northern poets of the last century, who died earlier this year, was for over half a century, always an inspiration to readers and a father figure to several generations of new writers and artists, across the disciplines. Awarded a CBE and was a member of Aosdána, he was also a Patron and friend of The John Hewitt Society and read at the Summer School and other events. In 2007, with his friend Frank Ormsby, he edited an edition of Selected Poetry of John Hewitt and launched the second edition of this book in 2022.

Over six decades, from the publication of No Continuing City in 1969 to that of Ash Keys: New Selected Poems in 2024, Michael Longley developed a rich body of poetry, exploring themes such as nature, love, and human conflicts. Florence Impens’ talk considers the diversity of Michael Longley’s work in the context of his interest in poetry as craft, showing how this might be seen as a unifying thread bringing his oeuvre together. 

Dr. Florence Impens lives and works in Dublin. A scholar of contemporary British and Irish poetry, she is the author notably of The Answering Voice: Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960.

 Gail McConnell is an award-winning from Belfast. Her first poetry book, The Sun is Open (2022), won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.