Today’s blogpost develops the recent theme of going further with the settings you use in your writing. We’ll approach the topic from a fresh angle by exploring the work of the Anglo-Irish poet Michael Longley, to see what can be learned from him more generally for writing about physical environments of all kinds. (NB See here and here for two other recent blogposts about making the most of settings in your writing).
For those who don’t know Longley’s writing – a brief intro…
Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and worked in Belfast, Dublin, and London before retirement. Along with Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and others, he has been celebrated as part of the remarkable cohort of Irish writers revitalising poetry from the 1960s onwards. Although all of his books contain outstanding poems, his collections during the period from Gorse Fires (1991), through The Ghost Orchid (1995), to The Weather in Japan (2000) are – for this reader at least – particularly worth seeking out, as they contain perhaps his most consistently brilliant work. He is known for his poems responding to The Troubles, for his translations of Homer and other classical poets (often speaking obliquely, as in this example, about modern conflict through ancient texts), and for writing about the First World War (in which his father fought), but if there is one subject he has returned to even more frequently than all of these, it is the physical landscape of Carrigskeewaun, in County Mayo in the West of Ireland, where Longley – throughout his life – has made regular visits to stay in a remote cottage belonging to a friend.
Over the years of reading Longley’s poetry, I’ve returned to his poems about Carrigskeewaun repeatedly, wondering what it is that beguiles me on the page and keeps me reading. What is it that elevates these poems beyond the routine tropes of pastoral poetry?
In what follows, I’m aiming to uncover some strategies we might apply to writing about landscapes and locations of all kinds, including the urban…
(1) For me, a core part of what makes Longley special is that he has become very strongly associated with that one particular place, Carrigskeewaun, and has tried to extract every small drop of meaning from exploring it. (We might be using any location as an example here, but in this instance, we are talking about an area that – in Longley’s poems – includes farmland and seashore, populated by rich plant and animal life, yet also possessing some of the qualities of a remote wilderness: as Michael Viney puts it here, it’s “a primal-seeming no-man’s-land of rock and sand-dune, sandy machair, sandy lakes, cliffs dark with ivy, a wild topography brooded over by Mweelrea Mountain and hemmed around by sea.”) Longley has written of his connection to the place as follows: “I fell in love with Carrigskeewaun the first time I saw it more than thirty years ago from the turn in the road above Thallabaun…I’m still only scratching the surface. Carrigskeewaun provides me with the template for experiencing all other places and keeps me sensitive, I hope, to the nuances of locality.”
Invitation #1: As writers, whether we are most drawn to write about rural or urban settings, we could be inspired by Longley’s example to become fascinated by a particular kind of territory, and to root our writing somewhere recurringly (even if, as with Longley, it’s not where we live). What might happen in our writing if we explore a particular type of physical situation especially deeply? What might that specific location be in your case? Or maybe instead it’s a type of location you’re fascinated by – ports, airports, churches, mosques, rivers, bridges, hospitals, nightclubs, schools, factories, farms, solar farms, and so on. How might you develop what might be called a “productive obsession” in your writing?
(2) Another part of the answer, for me, is that Longley scrutinises landscapes with the triple-eye of a botanist, ornithologist, and zoologist all rolled into one. In his poems he is a model of good practice for “the writer as witness”, a mindset and responsibility that transcends subject matter, genre or literary form. Such a detailed witnessing and understanding of landscape, including a deep knowledge of its associated shapes and vocabulary, is not a skill we are born with – it’s something acquired through diligent study and a lifetime of accumulation. Longley, for example, gained much of his knowledge of botany via a 40-year friendship with the painter of orchids Raymond Piper.
Invitation #2: How might we as writers become more devoted to learning about the physical world we inhabit? If you’re interested in urban spaces, might you research cities as a physical phenomenon? Or the architecture of individual buildings? If you’re interested in rural places, how might you be inspired to strengthen your knowledge of natural forms? In short, how might we all delve even more deeply into the phenomena of the physical world, as Longley has?
(3) Furthermore, Longley is particularly good at manifesting competing impulses within his depictions of landscape: abundance and entropy, tenderness and brutality. Time and time again, his descriptions of settings contain shades of nuance, doubleness and complexity.
By way of example, here, in the first short section (‘The Mountain’) of this poem sequence called ‘Carrigskeewaun’, the morbid “skulls, bones… [and] marrow” offer a stark and incongruous contrast with the innocence of “children… and picnic things.”
And here, in ‘Between Hovers’, what could be purely a bleak narrative about a dead badger and a dead otter is suspended within a balanced framework that is “floodlit… [with] filament[s] of light… [and] sparkle…”, includes reference to “a spring tide”, and moves towards a closing image suggestive of transcendence.
Invitation #3: Where might you find opportunities, in your own writing, to remain open to complexity, by finding in your landscapes/locations contrasting aspects of both vitality and decay? Or a fluidity between gentleness and harshness?
(4) Lastly, Longley often places human experience within the context of the natural, or frames the natural world within the context of the human. He does this by effortlessly setting human and natural objects side by side within his landscapes, or else by deploying particular verbs or nouns as metaphors to make the natural and the human seem even more deeply intertwined.
Here, in ‘The Strand’ (part of the ‘Carrigskeewaun’ sequence again), the trails of a bird, children, and the narrator are all shown to be physically interconnected with and adjacent to the sand dunes and the seashore:
”….a sanderling’s tiny trail,
The footprints of the children and my own
Linking the dunes to the water’s edge…”
And here, in ‘The Leveret‘, we can see Longley toying with individual word choices to mix up ideas of the human (or human-built) and the natural: the conception of a baby is a “fire-seed”, young birds are a “sootfall”, and the leveret takes “breakfast”, an image that seems, in this context, very humanised.
Invitation #4: In your own writing, might you experiment with juxtaposing/blurring the natural and the human, through your choices of objects, symbols and metaphors? Might you, for example, experiment with using verbs that humanise your physical settings, or make your descriptions of people seem more animal-like, in an artful way?
One Final Invitation: In the coming days, why not carve out a bit more time to linger with Longley’s poems (there are some further links below…) and then return to your novella-in-flash (or any other writing project – a short story, a set of poems, a novel), and explore ways to transform your writing. In what new and subtle ways might it become a treasure house of encounters with the physical world that surrounds us…
Michael Longley: ‘Remembering Carrigskeewaun’
Michael Longley: Selected Other Poems
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