The Weather in Japan (Paperback)

Many of the are about war and conflict and even in those Longley manages to insert optimism, A Poppy is a particularly good example. In this poem there are links made between a soldier's head and a poppy head, how they can both be weighed down. There is no doubt of the death and waste and destruction in this poem and yet it ends, "and the poppy that sheds its flower-heads in a day grows in one summer four hundred more, which means two thousand petals overlapping as though to make a cape for the corn goddess or a soldier's soul. To be able to see such beauty in the middle of devastation is so uplifting.

Longley turns to nature - A stunning example of this is The Choughs where Longley likens the birds and their habits to the raw recruits of his father's company and paints both a comic and sad picture of "young soldiers lifting their testicles into the sky" The Exhibit, is yet another fine example of the power than can be captured in just four lines, The Daffodils is terrific and points us to the repeating pattern of nature. In this poem life as a mother (adult) and daughter (child) and then mother-child is summed up in nine lines

Longley captures half-rhymes and near rhymes in the middle of lines, this is particularly noticeable in Poetry which catalogues poets who have carried on writing despite the horrors throughout time. Longley can write with menace as evidenced by The Excavator. It seems like an innocent little poem, only five lines long, talking about the digging out a space for a pond/lake to be looked at and admired from his double bed, but we are reminded of the danger that surrounds him (and us) in the shape of a hovering kestrel. There are two very tender poems as dedications to animals, one The Flock , and the other The Horses, There is regret too, as in Pale Butterwort where the poet, despite recognizing the beauty of the flower, sees the danger it contains.

In The Lapwing again death is very evident, somehow it seems to be Longley stating the inevitability of his own and everyone else's death. Despite the heavy message it has a light, accepting, philosophical approach to the subject and is not at all depressing. Longley can capture an image in a few powerful words, as in the title poem of this collection, The Weather in Japan. In just two lines he manages to paint a picture of Japan as most of us see it, "Makes bead curtains of the rain, Of the mist a paper screen." This is absolutely fabulous, this use of rain and mist to create the beaded curtains and paper screen. He is poignant too, as in The Cenotaph, where again in just three lines he tells us of an improvised cenotaph made of snow where the soldiers carved out 'Lest We Forget' which was meant to be a memorial, yet we know when we read the poem that this particular tribute will simply melt away.

His dedication poems to people are particularly tender, as the one to Sean Dunn in A Sprig of Bay, and to Brendan Kennelly, in The Factory, where he likens Brendan's voice to the "sound of water over stones". Even when he is addressing the difficult subject of the troubles in Northern Ireland, as in All of These People, Longley manages to find a down to earth way of expressing the humanity of everyone involved and ends with, "Who can bring peace to people who are not civilized? All of these people, alive or dead, are civilized.

This is a collection of a realistic man. Someone who can write about death without being over morbid, can write about the beauty of nature and the strength and fortitude of human beings despite our failings. His short poems are tremendously powerful. His way of looking at life is philosophical yet contains an optimism. He uses myth and legend and experience of relationships. His style is easy and relaxed without obvious rhymes but with tremendous sense of rhythm. He manages to capture tragedy and joy. As Seamus Heaney says, Longley is "A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders" and this is nowhere better demonstrated than in The War Graves, a long structured poem of twelve stanzas each of four lines, where while he calls into question the position of the Church and the presence of death and destruction and yet still ends with, "... and a village graveyard encompass Wilfred Owen's Allotment, and there we pick from a nettle bed, one celandine each, the flower that outwits winter."