The early poems of Michael Longley … are the work of a self-conscious, urban sophisticate for whom Ireland as a possible poetic subject scarcely exists. Indeed his first volume, No Continuing City (1969), contained only one poem on an explicitly Irish subject. In that collection we enter a world of private associations, of wit, intelligence and formal relations. Elaborate metaphysical conceits are skilfully worked, an instinct for subjective allegory is indulged, while the central properties of the poet's consciousness are urban and bourgeois. The tone, imagery and rhythms imply a humanist education; the poems on personal relations suggest a sense of formality and tradition, of civilised rituals and conventions…. At their purest these poems attain to moments of refined mystery…. (p. 201)

But Longley's early poetry is rarely as emotionally pure as it is in these moments of stylised reflection. There is in the volume an underlying nervousness, a heightened self-consciousness that suggests emotional insecurity. The poems are often so careful in their cerebral control, so syntactically exact as to suggest a poet who knows there are wilder regions of experience than he can yet safely consider. Longley frequently employs the words 'mind' and 'head' at central points in his early poems, and a sense of the self ordering its perceptions dominates the book…. The poet in this volume arranges the world strategically as a series of sharply focused snapshots…. Experience is organised in many of the poems into sequences of finely polished images so that had Longley's second volume not shown considerable advances on his first, he would surely have achieved a reputation as a skilled miniaturist whose work verges on the precious. (pp. 202-03)

In some poems in No Continuing City, however, Longley dramatises a dialectic between the mind and the world beyond its organising power. In 'A Personal Statement' that world comprises the body and its physical perceptions. But even here the poet hopes for balance, control, a harmonious synthesis…. The intricate formality of the poem … suggests that the mind is still firmly in authority. The solution of sense and emotion is still being filtered through a mental membrane. In 'The Hebrides', a poem of an equivalent formal intricacy, the dialectic is more fully realised as the poet tests his urban intelligence against a wild natural landscape in which no principles of rational order can be discerned…. (p. 203)

Longley's second volume An Exploded View (1973) allows the insecurity and emotional pain implicit in his earlier book to surface. The self-conscious artifice and formal elaboration of the earlier book is reduced to a tougher-minded economy of statement and a hard-edged clarity of image and diction. The poet's central concern is still himself, but the self-absorption is recognised as slightly ludicrous, in contrast to his earlier work where it was accorded solemn esteem. Many poems in An Exploded View therefore present the poet as a clownish ridiculous figure, important to himself but minuscule, unimportant in larger, more public contexts. In 'The Rope-Makers' the poet diminishes 'in a square of light'…. In 'Dark Glasses' the poet glimpses his 'own reduced expression' in the images reflected in a pair of sun-glasses…. [In 'Alibis'] Longley's internal world of refined formality, precious itemising, and protective style has been disturbed by public, social and historical forces. Language and poetic structure can no longer control the poet's insecurity, heightened now by undeniable external pressures aggravating personal strains.

The central insecurity of the volume is that relating to the poet's confused sense of national identity, explored in the sequence 'Letters'. Longley believes that the violence in Northern Ireland in recent years originates in...