The Weather in Japan [Paperback]

The Weather In Japan is Belfast-born Michael Longley's third new book of poetry in a decade: Gorse Fires (1991) ended a long poetic silence and earned its author the Whitbread Prize for poetry, and the subsequent The Ghost Orchid (1995) affirmed the re-emergence of a singular poetic voice, notable for its density of image and metaphor and at ease with classical allusion. Yet for all that his verse is marked by a patient clarity of perception and rhythmic virtuosity that renders complex ideas with a distilled and careful elegance. Longley places painting and literature alongside the natural world in the constellations by which he steers, and if many of the poems here hint at man's capacity for violence, brutality and chaos, the poet's sure guide is the brief illumination afforded by the organising gestures of culture or the epiphanic beauty of nature. The title poem's Zen brevity exemplifies this: "THE WEATHER IN JAPAN/Makes bead curtains of the rain,/ Of the mist a paper screen" recasts Ezra Pound's imagist verse as an end-of-century meditation on the reciprocal transformations between art and experience.

Longley's confidences rest ultimately in the observation of the particular and in local and domestic manifestations of generosity and democracy, offering the reader the trembling compass-point of a life creatively rendered: in "All Of These People" he recalls the suggestion that "the opposite of war/ Is not so much peace as civilisation", instanced by the cobbler who "mends shoes for everybody" and by the butcher who "blends into his best sausages leeks, garlic, honey". The last might stand as a metaphor for Longley himself, a generous versifier blending the rich elements of poetry's resources with the small insights that affirm our humanity. --Burhan Tufail

The new collection from one of the greatest living poets.

In the space of two collections, Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995), Michael Longley broke a long poetic slience and re-drew the map of poverty at the end of the millenium. THE WEATHER IN JAPAN consolidates and expands the vision of those volumes, leading the reader through the various hells we have made this century. Preferring to see the horrors of political violence through the filter of the domestic, pointing up the fragility of the order we create, he takes us from the fields of Flanders, through Terezin and Auschwitz to the troubled north of Ireland. And, in images drawn from the west of Ireland, Italy, America and Japan, he explores the fundamentals of 'home' and 'civilisation'. Longley's grave humanity, Zen-like connective imagination and ecological eye give the most delicate compelx, beautiful things - a spring gentian, a lapwing or a snowflake - the nutritious light that allows them to grow greater than the crass brutality that surrounds them. (19990927)