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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.
". . . Russell does show that Longley and Heaney have contributed appreciably to the peace process in Northern Ireland through their poetry, which remaining utterly faithful to its own autonomy, creates a discourse that escaped the violence and vengeance that have marked Northern Ireland since the Troubles. It does so by creating an imaginative space for the other and by emphasizing the shared cultural patrimony of the province. Russell luminously illustrates how Longley's and Heaney's emphasis on the legacy shared by Protestants and Catholics opens a way past the cycle of carnage and settling of scores; this emphasis affirms a community that includes all those once excluded by sectarian fury and mania." —Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice
Richard Rankin Russell is associate professor of English at Baylor University. He is the author of Bernard MacLaverty and Martin McDonagh: A Casebook.