The Weather in Japan is the third instalment in Michael Longley's remarkable self-renewal as a poet. After the long silence of the 1980s, during which he immersed himself in the Homeric poems and wrote very little, Gorse Fires (1991) set a new tone and texture in his work, to be extended four years later by The Ghost Orchid (1995). The Weather in Japan confirms Longley even further as a poet in possession of that greatest of artistic attainments: style.
The first phase of Longley's career concluded with the publication of Poems 1963- 1983. Here the Audenesque voice was at home in a tight prosody, with an argumentative density that we recognise as characteristic of the English tradition. In the new voice of the 1990s, Longley moved on to develop an airiness, a lightness of verbal touch. While the earlier work had always seen the natural world as a touchstone, the language of his second stage was more fully opened up to the great outdoors.
By now, Longley is so secure in his veneration of nature and the countryside that he no longer needs to labour after formal demonstrations. There's a "quick-sketch " look to many of these short poems. One of the best, `The Comber' - originally published in these pages - captures the exact moment when the poet sees an otter in the sea on his beloved Mayo coast: "Water and sunlight contain all the colours/And suspend between Inishbofin and me/The otter, and thus we meet . . ." This time, however, the poet pushes the analysis a little bit farther: it's really the poem that constitutes their meeting ("this is the only sound I make."); anything more and the shy otter would be gone.
These delicate manoeuvres are not the whole show, but their attitude of haunted veneration sets the tone for much else, even where the poet is speaking in a more manly mode - to his late father, for instance, in the first World War trenches in `January 12, 1996'. He writes to him on what would have been his 100th birthday and sees: "How he lifts with tongs from the brazier an ember/ And in its glow reads my words and sets them aside."
In `The Horses', another poem on the Great War, that radical caesura for the English tradition, Longley commemorates the wounded and dying horses by an image from his beloved Homer, the horses of Patroclus's chariot who will not move following the death of their champion.
Although his instincts are private and tender, the poet can be roused to anger, when hospitality is betrayed, or when careless speech glosses over brutality. `The Vision of Theoclymenus' is an outstanding diatribe, with a seasoning of Ulster-Scots, against the suitors in Odysseus's house who are usurping his place in his absence but whose doom is imminent. The crossbeams in that poem, dripping blood as Odysseus takes his revenge, lead us to another beautiful poem, `The Bullet Hole': here Longley's Uncle Matt, in Italy at the end of the second World War, shoots into a house where he fears there may be some German stragglers, "leaving/In the chestnut crossbeam a hole, a stray bullet/That has taken half a century to find its mark."
The stray bullet finds its mark in this poem, and the best pieces in the collection are where the poet is capable of precisely this degree of subtle self-consciousness, working at his craft, questioning the world. There is a tendency in Longley at this stage to cast doubt, however, on the whole process of literary achievement, with its aspirations towards awards, recognition and a place in the currency of the marketplace. This is why the oriental touch, with its atmosphere of removal from the busy world, is so congenial and fitting. In `Birds & Flowers', a poem dedicated to a Japanese friend, Longley advises that "The world of letters is a treacherous place. We are weak/And unstable. Let us float naked again in volcanic/ Pools . . ."
In keeping with this, the collection closes with `Invocation'. The poet has been "a caged cricket/Cheeping for the girl who plants the last rice seed./I have a good idea of what's going on outside."
So the writer points away from his work to the world beyond, a gesture of Zen wisdom from someone sufficiently secure in his reputation that he can do without it. This unusual challenge from a poet to his readers is one which will echo deeply in many of us, busy in the rush of our own manners and motives.
Sean Lysaght is the author of three collections of poetry. His most recent, Scarecrow, was published by Gallery Press