Love Poet, Carpenter : Michael Longley at Seventy

Michael Longley once remarked, 'If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there'.

In the forty years since his first book, "No Continuing City", Longley has shown he has been there, many times.

This book is firstly a salute to a poet whose formal invention and lyrical depth are exemplary, but it is also an affectionate tribute by sixty writers, artists and friends to a man of great personal warmth and generosity - who has done so much for the arts in his native Ulster.

Michael Longley has been acknowledged as one of our greatest living poets: Seamus Heaney describing him as 'a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders' and John Burnside as 'one of the finest lyric poets of our century'.

Longley is also a poet of variety and influence, working in a number of modes and excelling in all of them.

As a war poet he links Homeric Greece to the Somme and the 'Troubles' - believing, as David Jones did, that all wars are, in essence, the same war.

Similarly, as a nature poet, love poet and elegist, he is a celebrant of life in all its states and stages.

Whether he is writing of his home city of Belfast or his second, adopted 'home' in Carrigskeewaun, Co. Mayo; whether it's of the 'heroic' dead of the Great War or the diminished dead of the ghettoes or the camps; whether he is describing a flight of birds or a wild flower, Michael Longley is always celebrating the gentleness, transience and beauty of life.

As he says in the one-line poem "Lost": 'my lost lamb lovelier than all the wool'.

This book, then, is a celebration of the celebrant.