The Stairwell

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is w…