Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney's lives and careers have been
intertwined since the 1960s, when they participated in the Belfast
Group of creative writers and later edited the literary journal
"Northern Review." In "Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus
Heaney, and Northern Ireland," Richard Rankin Russell explores
Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination in the
midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through
poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space,
Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialogue
and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the
Troubles.
The first chapter examines the influence of the Belfast Group on
Longley and Heaney's shared aesthetic of poetry. Successive
chapters analyze major works by both poets. Russell offers close
readings of poems in the context of the poets' cultural and
political concerns for the province. He concludes by showing how
thoroughly their poetic language has entered the cultural,
educational, and political discourse of contemporary Northern
Ireland as it pursues the process of peace.
"Richard Rankin Russell shows clearly there are strands of
reconciliatory feeling, desire, and attitude that bind the poetry
of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley together. He demonstrates on
the strength of this reconciliatory aesthetic how these poets ought
to be considered together in critical intimacy. Along the way,
Russell draws profitably on some interesting and occasionally
little-known thinkers on religion and the sacred." --John Wilson
Foster, University of British Columbia
"Although Richard Rankin Russell is wise enough to realize that
poets are not 'legislators of the world, ' whether acknowledged or
unacknowledged, he argues convincingly that Seamus Heaney and
Michael Longley have nurtured the process of reconciliation in
war-torn Northern Ireland. By concentrating on the way they have
addressed the violence that has ruined so many lives in their home
country, Russell makes a significant contribution to the
scholarship that surrounds them and their peers. He also teaches us
how the imagination that makes art can also make peace." --Henry
Hart, College of William and Mary
"Russell's book takes a worthwhile and relatively unusual
approach to criticism of modern poetry from Northern Ireland, by
combining in-depth study of two poets, and putting these figures in
the context of what he calls 'reconciliation'--that is to say, the
evolving peace-process in contemporary Northern Ireland, along with
the history of its long gestation through the years of the
Troubles. Russell believes that art--and in this case the art is
poetry--made a difference to political and cultural developments in
Northern Ireland over the past thirty and more years, and that this
difference was one for the better, contributing to the political
developments that delivered (or at least have so far seemed to
deliver) an end to violence in the Province." --Peter McDonald,
Oxford University
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