Michael Longley at New Statesman

At New Statesman, Michael Longley recounts Northern Ireland's Troubles and the poetry that emerged in its wake. "Northern Ireland is not a place apart. Its civil war, which killed more than three and a half thousand people, belongs to the dark history of European conflict," Longley writes. From there: 

In writing about the Troubles the poets of my generation took their bearings from Yeats and MacNeice, from the poems of Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis in the Second World War, from the Great War poets – Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Blunden, Gurney, Edward Thomas. We read Brecht, Célan, Apollinaire, Montale, Akhmatova, Rózewicz and reached back to Homer’s Iliad. But from the outset it has been (and still is) hugely difficult – impossible even – to find in poetry a voice, as Seamus Heaney put it, “adequate to our predicament”. In a poem called “Wounds” which I wrote in 1972 I ask the ghost of my father what he makes of it all: he had joined up as a boy-soldier in 1914 and fought in the Trenches. Here is the poem’s second section:

Now, with military honours of a kind,
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
A packet of Woodbines I throw in,
A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Paralysed as heavy guns put out
The night-light in a nursery for ever;
Also a bus-conductor’s uniform –
He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers
Without a murmur, shot through the head
By a shivering boy who wandered in
Before they could turn the television down
Or tidy away the supper dishes.
To the children, to a bewildered wife,
I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.

When the Bogside erupted in 1969 and West Belfast went up in flames, I was flabbergasted by the ferocity of it all. In the summer of 1969 Derek Mahon and I walked through the wreckage of the Falls Road. 

Read more at New Statesman.