Selected Poems: Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Longley. This item is unavailable.Selected Poems: Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Longley

'I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.'Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural'.

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. He has published nine collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won both the Hawthornden Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His Collected Poems appeared in 2006, and his most recent collection A Hundred Doors (2011) won the Irish Times New Poetry Prize. In 2001 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, later a bishop. He was educated in England at Sherborne, Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. His first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, appeared in 1929, and he subsequently worked as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963.