Snow Water

"The poems collected in Snow Water find their gravity and centre in Michael Longley's adopted home in west Mayo, but range widely in their attention - from ancient Greece to Paris and Pisa, from Central Park to the trenches of the Somme. In these meditations on nature and mortality, there is a depth and delicacy, a state of lucid wonder, that allow for the easy companionship of love poem and elegy, hymns to marriage and friendship and lyric explorations of loss." "Though the embodiment of these themes is often found in the wildlife of Carrigskeewaun - the plovers and oystercatchers and whooper swans, the hares and otters, the marsh marigolds and yellow flags - Snow Water is emphatically a celebration of humanity. These are all, in a way, poems of love and kinship - even the magnificent sequence that links the horrors of the Great War with those of the Trojan War, and with all the wars between."--BOOK JACKET.