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    The Stairwell
    The Stairwell
    The Stairwell
    Ebook92 pages45 minutes

    The Stairwell

    By Michael Longley

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley's themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: “I have been thinking about the music for my funeral. . .” The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence—both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin's death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming.Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word “stairwell” is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and “homeland.” The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWake Forest University Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2019
    ISBN9781943666270
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      Book preview

      The Stairwell - Michael Longley

      Acknowledgements

      PART ONE

      Hap the blanket round me

      And tuck in a flower

      W. S. Graham

      THE STAIRWELL

      for Lucy McDiarmid

      I have been thinking about the music for my funeral—

      Liszt’s transcription of that Schumann song, for instance,

      ‘Dedication’—inwardness meets the poetry of excess—

      When you lead me out of your apartment to demonstrate

      In the Halloween-decorated lobby the perfect acoustic

      Of the stairwell, and stand among pumpkins, cobwebby

      Skulls, dancing skeletons, and blow kisses at the ceiling,

      Whistling Great War numbers—‘Over There’, ‘It’s a Long,

      Long Way’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ (the refrain)—

      As though for my father who could also whistle them,

      Trench memories, your eyes closed, your head tilted back,

      Your cheeks filling up with air and melody and laughter.

      I hold the banister. I touch your arm. Listen, Lucy,

      There are songbirds circling high up in the stairwell.

      DEATHBED

      I imagine my deathbed like my friends’ love bed

      Whose friends come into the house for breakfast

      Every morning, robins, one long-legged, fleet,

      The original, another lurking in a corner,

      One searching under the bed for spiders,

      One swooping from doorway to cheese-dish.

      When I die I shall give them all their names.

      There will be many robin generations

      Coming into the house, and wrens and blackbirds

      And long-tailed tits will learn from the robins

      About the cheese-dish and saucer of

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