Writers pay tribute at Michael Longley's 70th birthday

Michael Longley with Seamus Heaney at Queen's University Belfast. Photograph: Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

SEAMUS HEANEY and other literary figures assembled at Queen’s University Belfast yesterday evening to pay a surprise 70th birthday tribute to the Belfast poet Michael Longley.

More than 50 artists, mostly poets and prose writers, contributed to a festschrift, entitled Love Poet, Carpenter , celebrating his life and work.

Somehow, mainly through the clandestine work of Longley’s wife and fellow poet Edna, word of the celebratory book and birthday party – slightly premature, as he isn’t quite 70 – never filtered through to Longley himself.

He was suitably taken aback when he arrived at Queen’s for what he was assured was some rather innocuous event, directing mock reproachful looks at his wife.

British poet Robin Robertson, who delivered the main address last night and who is Longley’s poetry editor at publishers Jonathan Cape, said the book and occasion would not have been possible without Edna Longley.

“I am very disturbed that my wife is so good at dissembling; what else has she been up to!” the birthday poet said.

Contributors to the festschrift included Heaney, Seamus Deane, Anne Enright, Bernard McLaverty, John Montague, Eugene McCabe, Brian Keenan, Matthew Sweeney, Dermot Healy, Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson and Irvine Welsh, quite a number of whom attended the bash.

Heaney said Longley’s friendship was of vital importance to him and his wife, Marie, for well over 40 years, going back to 1963 when the emerging Belfast-based poets such as Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland and Edna gathered in Longley’s flat on Malone Avenue in Belfast.

“It was certainly one of the centres of poetry of these islands in the 1960s. It was a sort of high-voltage area,” Heaney recalled. “Friendships from the beginning are crucial and are never as intense again. So I have a deep connection and deep respect for Michael’s achievement.”

Longley recalled that period too and how as well as the hard work they all found time to frequent the south Belfast “Bermuda Triangle of the Wellington Park Hotel and the Botanic and Eglantine” pubs and how they all wondered if they “would ever see 40” – and here he was “a 70-year-old smiling public man”.